In the closing segment of the Brand Trust podcast (Episode 19), host Virginie Glaenzer leads a tour‑de‑table where participants reflect on the conversation’s key insights. The group links brand trust to deeper concepts of healing emotional wounds, regenerative purpose, and the need for organizations to re‑author their narratives. Virginie emphasizes letting go of internal, employee‑centric stories and reshaping them into open, customer‑inviting narratives that foster belonging. Michelle expands the view, framing organizations as living systems that must ask profound questions about their unique contribution to thriving life and adopt a thrivability ethic inspired by Aldo Leopold. Dan highlights the courage required to stake out an organization’s identity, to say no, and to alienate mismatched customers as a pathway to authentic trust. John discusses the paradox of mounting performance pressure and expanding opportunity, arguing that trust is the linchpin for pull‑based marketing and for a value‑reciprocity model of data sharing, where customers willingly provide data when they receive tangible benefits. Across the dialogue, participants propose redefining KPIs beyond numeric metrics to “what has to be true,” and they call for regenerative, healing‑oriented brand strategies that enable beauty, integrity, and regenerative capacity in the communities they touch.
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Before we wrap up this conversation, I want to thank all of you for this insightful discussion. And as we come to the end of the hour, I'd like to finish the way we began with a tour de table. The intention for this podcast is to help each of us to become the self-authoring leader of our lives through meaningful action. So let's pass the mic and share what any last reflection or any reflection that actually have emerged from our conversation or any last thoughts that you feel was left unsaid that you'd like to leave us with. And I'll start by sharing my own takeaways to give you a moment to collect your thoughts. So I, first of all, I found this conversation really interesting. We can talk about brand in so many different ways. I think this discussion of connecting brand and trust is a fundamental, critical issue that a lot of organizations do not want to address because it is so sensitive. It really connects to their own vulnerability. But I think there's an urgency to address brand and trust. And to me, from what I've heard I'm going to take away this idea that it's first about letting go our stories that we're so proud of, that may have created a sense of belonging within the employees when it's done well, but is certainly not relevant and meaningful to the customers. And converting and transforming those stories into a narrative that becomes an open invitation for people to capture and modify, which ultimately creates a sense of belonging into the customers through what you said, Michelle, contribution, community, and a heroic cause, I think is something that I want to explore a bit more. And I'm already thinking of a few customers that I'd like to bring this topic to them. I don't know how they're going to react because it's not, you know, Usually we ask marketers to do and not ask too many questions, but I think it's our role as marketers and leaders to start asking fundamental questions. And I think this second thing that I'll take with me is in light of those KPIs that unfortunately that's all we have today in most organizations to bring people together and agree on where we want to go and how we're going to measure if what we're doing is successful. Asking the question of what has to be true can actually lead— and that's really more my intuition talking— it could lead to a new set of KPIs. And KPIs are just data points, right? And those data points don't have to be necessarily numbers. It could also be something else, some sort of action, some sort of something that emerges. But I think it is a beautiful question to ask. And I've never heard of that, so thank you so much for this. So why don't we continue with this tour de table and have you, Michelle, any last thought, any reflection, things that have emerged during this conversation that you want to leave us with?
Wonderful conversation and beautiful alignment and coming from different directions. So That's really nice. I guess I would share in parting, if we see organizations and communities as living systems, and if we can acknowledge that there's an urgent need for thriving, for getting aligned behind life's ability to thrive for us as individuals, for organizations and communities, for the biosphere. And really, it's a need for healing. First of all, there's a lot of talk about regeneration and regenerative agriculture, regenerative everything. It's about healing. So if we can acknowledge that, that as the kind of fundamental urgent need, then I think we need to have some pretty profound conversations and ask much bigger questions about the contribution that we want to make as an organization, whatever our group of people is. What's the contribution that we uniquely can make given this need for healing and for reorientation around enabling life to thrive. And within that, we can ask, who do we choose to be together? You know, it's that level of profound conversation that I think is needed. And what's the nature of the conversation and the relationship with customers and community that we'll need to have if we're going to be able to make that contribution that we want to make? And what has to be true, you know, in the general sense along the way? And yeah, what are the meaningful and purposeful conversations and communications that would support that? And I think that's so much bigger than a brand. We might still call it that, but I think we're really needing to expand the intention behind it. And I really love, John, your concept of the narrative. As the call to action that calls together everyone that's touched by this endeavor, whatever it is. And the very last thing I'll say is my definition of, or kind of gauge of whether something is thrivable is, it's a riff off of Aldo Leopold, who was an environmentalist and he had a land ethic, so I've kind of reworded it to, "A thing is thrivable when it tends to enhance the beauty, integrity, and regenerative capacity of the living community it touches." So, John, that's sort of the call to action, you know, what could we do, all of us, not just the company, you know, but the community, the customers, that would enable more beauty, more integrity, more healing capacity, more thrivability. Let's like aim for that.
It's beautiful. Yes, healing. It's, it's interesting to connect brand trust now with healing, and it really means that if we are in a world of distrust, and that's the relationship that we have with brand, there has been some emotional wounds that needs to be healed. So it's, it's taking the conversation way deeper than just let's talk about brand trust and what kind of campaign can we do. So thank you for that, Michel. That was really deep. Dan, what would be your last thoughts or comment?
Right, well, just now, you know, building trust and conflicting beliefs seems to be a real challenge, and I'm going to take that away from this conversation I think our inability to kind of navigate different beliefs and somehow everything becomes, you're on that side of the line and I'm on this side of the line, seems to be a real challenge. So with that in mind, you know, this idea of trust building, I'm just going to speak to it from what I'm taking from this conversation in a very kind of tactile sort of way. It seems to me that an organization can stake out its turf. This is what we're about, and this is who we are, and find expressions of that in the community. And I think that the issue might be— part of the issue is finding the courage to say no and to alienate certain customers or turn certain customers off because this is what we're all about. So I feel like trust and courage seem to go together. If you don't have the courage to say no, then I'm not sure I can trust you. I'm not sure your yes is really, you know, a trustable yes. I'm just talking, you know, speaking about what's coming to mind for me. So, you know, I think declaring who you are and kind of staking that turf out And I think declaring who you are with kindness, not with defensiveness. I mean, this is what we're about. This is what our organization is about. It's not like, ooh, you're bad because you're not about what we're about. I think just kind of be who you are and connect with the people who embrace that sort of belief and have the courage to kindly alienate folks who might not hold to that. I mean, I mentioned Ducks Unlimited. A lot of people don't like guns. They're into guns. They're into guns and they're into managing ducks and wildlife and all that. I don't like that. Well, fine. But you know, so you— and to me, I feel, again, I'm not a hunter, but boy, I tell you what, I find trust in that clarity and who they are and how they're expressing it. So stake out your turf and do it kindly and be willing to say no to people, and I feel like maybe I could trust you then.
Right, so finding our truth takes courage in a way, whether it's as an individual or as an organization. Thank you very much, that was Another insightful snippet of it. Wonderful. John, I'm just going to let you complete this discussion and add any last thoughts or any comment you'd like.
Well, thank you. This discussion will never be complete. We've just started and a lot more to go, but I think I started my comments with the notion of mounting performance pressure in this big shift. I think there again is a paradox in the big shift because at the same time that it's creating mounting performance pressure, it's creating exponentially expanding opportunity. We can create far more value with far less resource far more quickly than would have been imaginable a decade or two ago. So the opportunity is enormous. It's not just about pressure, it's about how do you harness this opportunity that's now available to us. And that's where I think the issue of trust becomes central, because those who find ways to rebuild the trust, I believe, are going to be the ones that manage to, to most effectively target these opportunities. And I'll just— a couple of quick examples. One is I think there's going to be a fundamental shift in marketing. I think today we have a push-based marketing model where it's all about advertising and intercepting the customers and wherever captive audiences can be found versus pull-based marketing where you draw people to you through word of mouth because people trust you so much and you provided so much value to them. They're spreading the words to all their friends and community., and that's going to be a very powerful way to draw more and more business to you if you can rebuild the trust. And then the other side is the whole notion of trust and data. One of the things that I wrote a book about almost 20 years ago now is that there, there are some real, very limited number of privacy fanatics who just want to be invisible and not have anybody know anything about themselves. Most of us are very willing to share information about ourselves if we believe we're going to get value in return. And so I think the opportunity here is if companies can demonstrate that they're using this data to provide more value back to you as a customer, you're going to want to provide more and more data to them. And that's privileged access to data becomes a key driver of economic value in this changing world that we're in. So trust again becomes central to all of this. And I think it's a huge opportunity, and I just think we are not paying enough attention to why is trust eroding and what do we need to do to rebuild that trust.
Absolutely. And I think, as you mentioned, there are a few opportunities that a lot of CEOs should not be overlooked and, and push on the side just because of fear of their own vulnerability. But yes, pull-based marketing, marketing is an interesting notion, and I hope that more and more people will understand what it means. Thank you so much for spending that hour with me, and I hope that the listeners and viewers will share their comments and their own experience with— on this fantastic topic. So thank you so much.
