This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovic on Bloomberg Radio. Check out the definition of trust. You'll find firm belief in the reliability, truth ability, or strength of someone or something. And when it comes to consumers, trust has become key when it comes to how they look at brands. Let's get into this. Someone who keeps an eye on trust for the company's Trust Barometer is the founder and CE of the Global
Communications from Edelman, Richard Edelman. He's back with us once again on the phone in New York City. How are you, Carol, happy summer? It feels good right, but hey, yeah, it's a little human that's for sure. Um. Talk to us about your latest findings about brand trust and the importance of being able to trust a brand versus just being
in love with a brand. So, I think that the impact of the pandemic over the last year has been long lasting, and the people's values have change from about being about me to being more about we and things like, you know, meeting societal needs as opposed to just representing my lifestyle. And people are now doing what I call belief driven buying or they're exercising brand democracy in a
certain way. That's the relationship that you can best control. Uh, immediately you go to the store, you know, order what you want and Carol. The most incredible thing is that it's always been that brands can change culture. You know, you and I grew up in a time of you know, me and Joe Green and Coca Cola and all that that was changing culture. But people actually now believe that they can change brands. That in fact, two thirds of people say they can force a brand to change them
with anything about itself. That's stunning, but they can, right, especially if they're if they're voting with their dollars in terms of where they choose to spend money. I think that's right, that that that people have intuited that in this moment um, the brands they are going to buy or the brands are going to stand up and speak up for the better, and that they're going to speak up. Six percent of people told us one way or another, I want my brands to speak up about societal issues.
And that's a huge change. So, you know, if you think about Dove and campaign for Real Beauty that started more than ten years ago, and you know, they were talking about how women should be comfortable with their body
shapes and all this other. But but now Dove has morphed itself into talking about, you know, the necessity of looking at African men differently African American men is that that that they are um every bit, not just athletes, but also artists and politicians and all the rest of this. And they did that for Father's Day. And that's the kind of difference in brand marketing. You know. It's interesting.
I recently did a panel for the Milk and Health UH program, talking with the CEO of Kellogg, the president of Chobani, the CEO of Albertson's UH, and also a president of Union Lever, one of their global UH divisions, And it's interesting. We talked about really the evolving food system.
But one of the things is how consumers are driving change within the food system and how they are increasingly they want local, they want transparency, and that is forcing a lot of companies within the food space to produce either locally and make sure that they are being you know, true about what's in their product or where it's made, where it's produced, because consumers they want to know, and that's how they're buying it just in what you're saying.
Brand and cover reputation have completely merged, and things that were in the remit of the corporation like supply chain sustainability, diversity and inclusion, systemic racism were now being seen as within the power of the brand to change. And you have the people in our study said, look at the corporation is evil. I'm not going to buy the brand. Um. But by the same token, um, you have to have brands leading on sustainable packaging or on changing their sourcing
such that the workers make a decent wage. Here this is amazing. The most important thing for brand to earn trust is paying a worker a fair wage and giving that person good working conditions. And I know you had begmanquins on last week for Manpower, and we were talking last week at lunch a about you, but also about the reality that it's not enough just to pay people. They want to have flexibility, They want to know that
the company they work for is a decent company. So again, all of this is really coming together because business is now the most trust and institution, and brand is sort of the tip of the sphere, the thing that people can control. These a THESA corporations. What's interesting that you bring it up, and Becky and I talked about this and we're gonna talk at another Bloomberg um event tomorrow. Actually, you know, we're trying to get our hands around what
does that mean? You talk about workers being paid, but workers want flexibility. You know, we're still trying to grasp what coming back to work is like after the pandemic. Secrety Financial they've got three different scenarios. You can work at home permanently. You can kind of um say you're gonna come in and I need a seat, you know for a little bit. I think hotelling is what they call it. Or you can decide that you're going to have a hybrid approach and so you'll have a permanent
seat at works so that you have flexibility. But but we're hearing a lot of different scenarios. What are you hearing about that? Well, I think the financial services industry has taken the hardest line saying comes to the office period um our agency last week announcement, we're you know, three days in and two days out of office. And the hybrid is the invest approach UM and we're encouraging people to have vaccines, but those who don't, they're going
to have to wear a mask. And you know that's a real kind of issue because it's you know, is that a scarlet letter? And you know, do I want to be in the elevator with the math person and you know, I do think the big point is employees are now activists and that they think that they can
change company policy just the same way that consumers do. UM. And it's it's a you know, if you think about the power elite that's sitting at the top saying we have the decision making authority, not really, because you know, the people at the bottom are are now talking on social media and they're also acting and pushing corporations and brands. Right. Uh. Social media is given every individual consumer a soapbox and
one that can be heard pretty loudly. But even if you have a celebrity, right Christiano Ronaldo pushing you know, the soda ware last week, want water? Yeah? Right, And that just says so much. Um, we ran out of time. I know we'll talk with you again soon because you always bring us some really smart inside about what's going on, especially when it comes to consumers. Richard, thank you so much. Richard Edelman, CEO AT Edelman, joining us on the phone in New York,