Trustworthy

In today’s economy, trust is in short supply. Sales cycles take longer, citizens wade through misinformation, and marketing falls flat. Undermining confidence is cynicism: it erodes trust in media, government, and consumer brands. So how do we move forward? Follow a smart new framework to give control to your audience—and they’ll put more trust in you. It might be a scary proposition, but trading control for confidence fuels a surprising range of high-performing organizations and can strengthen society itself.

Airbnb, Zoom, the FBI, TED, the United Kingdom Government Digital Service, The New York Times, America’s Test Kitchen, local election commissions, and other organizations all embrace strategies of content and design that transform their audiences into empowered decision-makers. With empathy and authenticity, they teach their audiences to evaluate product options, engage in continuous self-education, and make more informed choices.

Examining what works among these teams of all stripes and sizes, content strategy expert Margot Bloomstein casts a broad net to capture the experiences of copywriters, designers, creative directors, and CMOs—people who work to build trust through imagery, editorial style, storytelling, and retail design.

With a bold vision and an actionable framework focused on voice, volume, and vulnerability, this book will teach you how to employ concrete tactics to help your brand regain trust, respect, and customer loyalty. You’ll learn to lead your organization and audience from cynicism toward something far more productive: hope.

Bio:

Margot Bloomstein is one of the leading voices in the content strategy industry. In addition to Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap, she is also the author of Content Strategy at Work: Real-World Stories to Strengthen Every Interactive Project as well as the principal of Appropriate, Inc., a brand and content strategy consultancy based in Boston. As a speaker and strategic adviser, she has worked with marketing teams in a range of leading organizations over the past two decades. The creator of BrandSort, she developed the popular message architecture-driven approach to content strategy. Margot teaches in the content strategy graduate program at FH Joanneum University in Graz, Austria, and lectures around the world about brand-driven content strategy and designing for trust.