Chapter 1: Trust - The Real Currency of Business

The 90s were all about reach.
The 2000s were all about website traffic.
The 2010s were all about followers.

And now? The 2020s are all about trust.

For decades we have chased visibility, reach, clicks, impressions, followers, but not belief. Attention used to be the goal. But attention just gets you noticed. Trust gets you chosen.

You can have the smartest strategy, the flashiest tech stack and the best creative in the world, but if the person on the other side does not trust you, it all collapses.

Trust is what drives real growth. It is what makes people believe you, buy from you and recommend you. It is the quiet, invisible currency that underpins every relationship in business.

The Invisible Metric

Marketers love numbers. We live in dashboards. We report, we optimise, we tweak. But trust does not fit neatly into a spreadsheet, so it gets ignored.

You cannot buy it. You cannot automate it. And because it is not easy to measure, it often gets treated like something fluffy or intangible. But it is not.

Trust shows up everywhere, in deal velocity, in client retention, in referral rates, and in whether a customer renews your contract without looking elsewhere. It is the thing behind every metric that actually matters.

The irony is that the more digital marketing has become, the more human buyers behave. They still rely on word of mouth. They still ask people they know. They still look for reassurance before they take a leap.

The Referral Economy

In B2B, trust does not just influence a sale, it drives it.

Every meaningful deal I have seen has started with a sentence like, “You should talk to…” That moment is when trust changes hands. It is the quiet engine that keeps business moving.

We are living in what I call the referral economy, a world where reputation, relationships and recommendations are worth more than paid reach.

The people who are trusted, consultants, marketers, agency leads, are more influential than ever. Their credibility is currency. Their networks are pipelines.

And yet, for all the value they create, those human connections have never been formally recognised or rewarded.

That is where the idea of the human affiliate comes in. Real professionals, using their experience and integrity to connect others, not influencers chasing clicks, but trusted voices shaping decisions.

Why Trust is Collapsing

Here is the paradox. We live in an era with more information than ever before, but less certainty.

AI writes our content. Social media distorts reality. Fake reviews fill the internet. We can measure everything except truth.

The result? People are sceptical. Brands are louder but less believable. Buyers want something real, a signal they can rely on.

That signal comes from people. From colleagues, peers, friends. From the people whose judgement they already trust.

That is the opportunity in front of us. The next era of marketing will not be about automation or algorithms. It will be about authenticity, credibility and the networks of people who make business happen.

The 2020s belong to trust.