We Are In A Trust Recession, But It’s Not Really Our Fault: Small Business Edition
(If you don't want to read, I'll read it to you!)
We are in a Trust Recession.
I think I’ve read that line a dozen times in the last month. And every statement, article, or meme that followed was correct.
Specifically in the online business space, we are seeing and experiencing levels of skepticism and mistrust like we’ve not seen before. Audiences, buyers & potential clients are hyper aware of scammy, dishonest & disingenuous content, marketing and business practices.
And, unfortunately, it seems like that kind of noise is the majority of what’s out there.
So how do we, as passionate, service focused entrepreneurs building from integrity, find our place among the slop?
The short answer: we do it differently.
The longer answer: we re-train ourselves out of the things we’ve been taught about online content marketing (the icky, bro-coded, slimy stuff) and anchor our messaging, content & strategy in trust, authority & connection.
What The Trust Recession Is
In the simplest terms, consumers no longer trust businesses, brands, creators, companies (the government ) the way they used to.
There are a lot of reasons that have been slow burning for the last few decades - this Forbes article breaks it down nicely - but for our purposes we’re going to focus on the online business space.
Within digital business & online marketing, we’re seeing the effects of the trust recession thanks to the trends, tactics, and practices that have dominated the space for the last few decades.
Things like bro-marketing with its aggressive & often manipulative tactics, industry “gurus” pushing watered down wisdom & one size fits all solutions, quick fix messaging, and the overly aesthetic & mostly fake influencer era.
Leanne Sia put it perfectly: “The online business space right now feels like a nightclub when the lights have just come on. The music's cut. The sparkle's gone. And suddenly, you can see the sticky floor, the smudged mascara, and the overpriced drinks.”
Show of hands if you’re currently standing in the club with the lights on.
And Why The Trust Recession In Our Space?
Oh, you know, just little things like:
A lack of integrity in customer experience that leaves people feeling duped, unsupported and truly unsatisfied.
Overall economic anxiety that drives purchasing decisions at every level.
A constant, mind numbing stream of content that becomes almost impossible to wade through so our brain simply dismiss or mistrust most of it.
Performative, insincere content & messaging that reads tone deaf amidst a world on fire.
The AI wave that has people asking, “Is this AI?” before they ask anything else.
And that's just to name a few.
Bottom line:
People are tired. They’re overstimulated, under-impressed and, honestly, they are starting to wake up to the wizard behind the curtain pulling the puppet strings.
The Well Trained Entrepreneur Is Waking Up…
If this post was at all interesting to you, I’m going to guess that you are an online small business owner who is realizing they simply cannot continue to market themselves, create content & promote their business the way we’ve been trained to.
Well, babe, same.
And here’s the good news in all of this: We are in a trust recession, and that is making our jobs harder, but it’s not really our fault.
For the majority of us, we started our businesses and learned content creation & marketing strategy from the aforementioned gurus.
We went to YouTube University and watched the flashy, well produced videos that told us to “create more!”, “hustle harder!”, “copy/paste this!”
And if you came up through the “Boss Babe” era like I did, you got the full brunt of girl boss rhetoric that left us feeling less than, burned-the fuck-out, and stuck in a cycle of content-for-clicks creation.
We simply did what we were told to do.
And now we’re living in a world built by a handful of influential industry leaders who set standards, created the templates, and then never bothered to add in that part about integrity.
Like so many parts of our life now, the trust recession is the result of blind capitalism, living almost exclusively on the internet, and better iPhone cameras.
Like the good students we were raised to be, we followed the lesson book…but now that we know, we can do better.
How We Start To Rebuild The Trust
Now I’m going to start with a question: Are you willing to do it differently?
The truth is, the only way we rebuild trust in a space where it’s been so badly damaged is to start making intentional changes to the playbook we were given.
(We could rip it up completely but I’m a work-smarter-not-harder kind of gal)
Our path toward better business, better practices, better content, & better marketing is being honest about what’s broken and making the necessary changes.
In many ways - and at the risk of sounding like my parents - we have to take things “old school”.
We return to a place of messaging to connect and not to gain clicks.
We build from a place of service-to-the-client instead of stroking the algorithm.
We worry more about customer experience than content calendars.
We take some serious pride in our businesses and lead from authority & passion.
We learn to trust ourselves, our instincts, and our better judgement.
Pretty much we do pre-internet business, content & marketing, but on the internet.
Yes, it’s not going to be as noisy as it used to be, but people aren’t responding to the noise. Yes, it may take a bit longer, but you want this to last anyway, right?
Now I am not so idealistic as to not recognize that deceptive, manipulative, and dishonest business, content & marketing has been happening since the dawn of business - it absolutely has - but what wasn’t always present, the internet, has amplified & expanded it all.
So it’s up to us to look the problem directly in its filtered face and say, “No more.”
Consider This First Step…
As I’ve been watching it from the inside, I’ve also been on the consumer end of the trust recession for a while.
Being in the online business world, specifically content creation & marketing strategy, I’ve seen every single tactic, trend, and cringe worthy “quick fix” of the last decade. And if I’m being honest, I’ve been duped too.
I’ve bought courses that promised all the answers & was left with more questions.
I’ve joined masterminds that were beautifully done but fell way short of the mark.
I’ve clicked ads that promised the most insane results & then realized without a large list, super warm audience, & ample money to invest, those results were not typical.
So yea, I also wear my skeptic hat more times than not these days and fully see why we are in a trust recession.
But I also deeply believe we can do better.
Feminine Authority Content & Marketing came from my experience as a small business owner, a small business consumer, and a woman in an industry dominated by louder-than-everyone-else bro marketers.
I’ve spent so many years feeling like the person standing in a room full of people hollering about the elephant parading through the crowd, picking pockets along the way, and no one else seemed to notice.
It became so uncomfortable, unsustainable, and icky for me, that I had to find a different way or I was simply going to quit.
Feminine Authority isn’t the reinvention of content & marketing, it’s a quieting, a focusing, and a grounding of the most basic parts of truly effective business promotion…
Honest, values based visibility
Intentional, human focused content
Authority built on trust & integrity
Sales as natural next steps
It’s content and marketing built on feminine energy and focused on connection, community, and trust.
And the first step in the framework is Value-Led Visibility, showing up with your truest voice, most authentic self, and with your values and mission on honest display so the people who most align with you, can easily know you’re for them.
You can take the workshop here: Value-Led Visibility
Or send me a message & let’s chat.
My dear small business friend, just because we were taught it one way, doesn’t mean we can’t say “No, thanks” and do it differently.
We may be in a trust recession but that just means that now is the time to be the loudest in the room not because we sound the same as everyone else, but because we sound totally, and beautifully, different.
