Chapter 2: The Trust Deficit

I don’t think most of us realised when it happened. One day, marketing was about credibility, a solid reputation, happy clients, a bit of PR in the trades, and the next, it was all about clicks, followers and impressions. Somewhere along the line, trust got traded for traffic.

For a while, it worked. The dashboards looked impressive, the graphs pointed up, and the word pipeline became the only KPI that mattered. But we all knew, deep down, something didn’t feel quite right.

You can’t build a relationship on retargeting. You can’t buy loyalty with a Google Ad Grant. You can’t earn belief with a pop up form.

Trust, once the invisible currency of business, was quietly devalued.

How we lost it

The 2010s were a wild time for B2B. Technology exploded. Automation promised to do the hard work for us. CRMs got smarter, content got cheaper, and everyone became a thought leader.

It was intoxicating. Suddenly, you could run campaigns that reached thousands of people you had never met. You could publish blog posts with keywords optimised to the inch. You could A/B test the word insights until it lost all meaning.

But as the volume went up, the signal went down.

Buyers stopped believing the noise. The trust that used to come from personal relationships, reputation and shared experience was replaced by algorithmic shouting. We made marketing louder, not better.

Then came AI, the most powerful amplifier of noise ever created.

When anyone can generate thought leadership in ten seconds flat, credibility becomes a scarce resource. The more machines can produce words, the more valuable it becomes when a human says something real.

The illusion of connection

Social media made us believe we were closer to our audience. In reality, it made us lazier.
We mistook visibility for influence. We thought a like equalled trust. We confused a follow for a recommendation.

But trust doesn’t scale the same way reach does. It is not built in feeds, it is built in conversations.
A client’s quiet recommendation over coffee has more influence than a million LinkedIn views.

Trust spreads differently. It doesn’t go viral. It travels through people who have earned the right to be believed, colleagues, peers, mentors, advisors. That is the real network that powers modern B2B.

A new economy emerges

As belief in brands declined, belief in people rose.
When you can’t trust the vendor, you trust the voice that tells you about the vendor.
When you can’t trust the ad, you trust the person who has used the product.

That is how the Human Affiliate was born, not as a marketing gimmick, but as a natural correction. A way for buyers to cut through the noise by relying on people whose judgment they respect.

In a world drowning in content, recommendation has become the highest form of currency.

We are moving from a marketing economy to a trust economy.
And in this new economy, your next sale will not come from your campaign, it will come from someone who believes in you enough to put their name to it.