Credibility is the new brand currency

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With AI-generated slop, misinformation and performative media abound, marketers are operating in what Cream's State of Trust report calls the "post-trust age." 

The rise of AI has only compounded pre-existing misgivings with the media, with trust in news sources declining across the board. The report reveals only 41% of global audiences believe online content is wholly accurate and human-generated — yet social media remains Gen Z's global destination for their search needs.

This mistrust, however, is less murky when it comes to our favourite brands. According to Edelman's latest Trust Barometer report, 80% of people now trust the brands they use more than business, government, media or even their employers.

In a climate defined by economic pressure, social volatility and fading faith in institutions, brands are the last bastions that still deliver. 

Trust in this sense is the "currency of consumer power", as decisive as price or quality when choosing what to buy — but it’s not shelf-ready.

When everyone doubts everything they see, credibility only belongs to the brands who — as Cream puts it — are "willing to open the curtain [and share] behind-the-scenes access as proof of integrity."

Marketers aren't just managing perception anymore. They're now in the business of managing proof.

The mechanics of credibility

When we spoke to Mike Barcroft, Innovation Director at Cream and co-author of the State of Trust report, we asked him where the line is between credibility and theatre. 

He pointed to a growing misconception that consumers expect brands to be perfect all the time — something he disagrees with. “They expect to understand why,” he says. “Showing work-in-progress can feel more credible than pitching flawlessness in a sceptical media climate.”

But comprehension alone doesn’t earn trust. It’s whether that honesty actually helps someone decide what to believe or buy — and that requires discomfort.

“Genuine transparency helps people make real decisions,” says Frankie Wheeler, co-founder of The Ripple Effect. “Performed transparency only helps a brand look good.”

Audiences can tell the difference because real transparency costs something. Comfort, convenience, control. “It involves sharing things you’d rather not, but that people deserve to know,” adds Amy Gilmore, strategy partner at Untangld.

Yet even candour fails if it lacks empathy. “People don’t just want to know the truth,” Gilmore continues. “They want to know you understand how that truth affects them.”

Empathy is the bridge between disclosure and belief. It’s what turns transparency from performance into proof.

How trust gets verified

According to Barcroft, “Trust breaks down quickest when the gap between promise and lived experience becomes visible.”

His audit for spotting that gap is simple:

• Do — Are we delivering core product benefits consistently and truthfully?

• Say — Does our narrative match observable behaviour?

• Why — Can we articulate the rationale behind decisions that affect customers?

This isn’t a comms exercise. It’s governance. As Frankie Wheeler puts it: “I’d want to look at message-to-reality alignment. Do the brand's claims match lived reality for customers, staff, stakeholders? What operational practices are in place to verify these?”

When communities can surface evidence instantly, behaviour is the only defensible territory. You can't claim values — you have to prove them. Barcroft points to what researcher Matt Klein calls distributed trust: “truth is collectively earned through receipts, screenshots, and consensus across communities rather than single authoritative voices.”

That redistribution is now measurable. “We’re tracking trust through social listening spikes, review variance, customer feedback and brand health data,” Wheeler says. “When the narrative and the lived experience start to diverge, you see it in those signals first.”

If you don't audit yourself, your audience will. The only question is whether you catch the gap first, or whether it’s screenshotted and archived as proof you can't be trusted.

How trust behaves in public

So, how should brands show up in feeds without contamination from the noise around them? Barcroft believes it’s all about restraint. "In chaotic feeds, brands need to think harder about the creative and medium that will create cut-through and would encourage brands to resist the temptation to feed into attention-arresting hyperbole for the sake of it."

The calmest voice in a noisy feed carries more authority than the loudest campaign. Why? Because in a credibility crisis, composure becomes differentiation. Restraint suggests you don't need to convince anyone. Hyperbole broadcasts that you're trying too hard.

“Try to model sanity amidst the chaos of it all,” says Gilmore. “The brands that maintain trust in that environment are the ones that don't get drawn in. They behave like people who are comfortable in their own skin. They show up with a consistent voice, they don't chase every meme, and they speak when you have something to say — not just something to post."

Composure alone can read as untouchable. Brands that are too measured, too polished, too consistently on-message start to feel corporate rather than credible. Which is why restraint needs a counterweight.

Audiences also want to see you're fallible. "Showing work-in-progress can feel more credible than pitching flawlessness in a sceptical media climate,” Barcroft notes.

Credibility now signals through vulnerability, not veneer. When you show something incomplete — a product still in development, a policy you're testing, a problem you're working through — you give people something to verify. 

Everlane's shift from "radical transparency" to "clean luxury" shows what that looks like in practice.

The company built its reputation on ethical claims, trademarking "radical transparency" as its calling card. Then came the 2020 reckoning: union-busting allegations, racism complaints from former employees, and accusations of greenwashing. The gap between promise and practice became undeniable.

Rather than retreat, Everlane is rebuilding credibility through operational accountability. The company now sources 90% lower-impact materials, has eliminated 95% of virgin plastics, and publishes detailed supply chain data tied to science-based climate targets. Its 2024 Impact Report explains where they're falling short, acknowledging that achieving living wages throughout their supply chain remains "very challenging."

This is the transparency of verifiable progress, with accountability built into the disclosure itself. Everlane stopped selling an image and started documenting the work — the uncomfortable, incomplete, measurable work of actually changing how they operate.

AI as the stress test

AI is where questions of credibility stop being abstract. It forces brands to decide, in real time, when disclosure builds trust and when it risks eroding it.

Barcroft believes disclosure around AI will likely become the legal and cultural norm, as the reputational cost of concealment is too dear.

When we asked him for his own rule of thumb on when to disclose AI involvement, his answer was pragmatic: "If knowing AI was involved would change how someone feels or behaves, disclose it."

“That being said, there are countless incredible examples of where AI has been used effectively to enhance a customer’s trust with a brand.” He nods to dAIsy, the AI-fighting scambot campaign from O2 earlier this year.

Wheeler points to two contrasting examples. When Guess ran an AI-generated model in a Vogue ad, the disclosure revealed economic constraint, not ethical commitment. Audiences understood immediately: if hiring a real model had been affordable, Guess would have done it.

In 2024, Dove used AI to expose beauty biases in other AI systems — positioning the technology as investigative tool, not creative shortcut. The disclosure became the argument. Purpose and practice aligned, so audiences accepted the AI use as proof of mission, not contradiction of it.

“If AI changes quality, fairness, authorship, or how personal data is used, tell people,” Wheeler says. “If it is just a back-office tool, I still think it should be used with care and always sense-checked. AI makes mistakes and being caught out will almost certainly cost customer trust.” 

Gilmore agrees that AI should be disclosed when it affects the relationships with customers rather than the process. If AI shapes something personal, something that is designed to create connection — a conversation, a creative output, a product recommendation — honesty can only deepen the relationship. 

“Trust is built emotionally first, rationally second,” Amy says. “People don’t mind the use of AI as long as brands show their care and commitment to the quality of their relationships.”

Trust as maintenance

At Cream, trust measurement has moved from sentiment tracking to systems design. Their 48-hour “Trust Delta” sprint is built around a simple premise: every brand has a measurable gap between what people expect and what they actually experience. The sprint’s job is to locate that gap, understand what caused it, and design visible proof to close it.

The process pulls live inputs — social listening spikes, review variance, customer-service transcripts, earned-media tone, and brand-health data — to map where perception drifts from performance. Those discrepancies are then codified into two practical tools:

• Expectation Gap Map — a heat map of where customer expectations diverge from lived reality (for instance, when a “next-day delivery” claim routinely becomes three).
  

• Proof-Stack Playbook — the evidence plan that follows: which receipts, behind-the-scenes stories, or operational changes will tangibly prove progress on those gaps.

The goal isn’t to sound transparent but to be inspectable. To make truth easier to verify than to doubt.

Trust doesn’t erode in sweeping scandals; it slips in the everyday frictions between promise and delivery. By instrumenting those frictions — tracking, testing, closing them — brands turn trust from a narrative into a process.

Because in the post-trust age, credibility isn’t built by saying the right thing once. It’s maintained by proving the right thing over and over again.

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Natasha Randhawa, newsletter editor - Department of Creative Affairs.