There’s a shift happening in business right now.
Most organisations can feel it. Few can explain it.
Growth feels harder. Customers take longer to decide. Loyalty disappears faster than expected.
This isn’t a marketing problem. It’s a trust problem.
We’re operating in what I call The Trust Deficit. A widening gap between how much organisations think customers trust them and how much customers actually do. It’s the defining commercial shift I’m seeing across industries right now, and the reason I’ve made it the focus of my keynote for 2026.
Consumer behaviour has always been my obsession. I’m endlessly interested in how customers decide what they want, who they believe and how brands earn their loyalty across different generations.
After two decades working in consumer insight strategy, I’ve become increasingly interested in one question: how customers actually decide who to believe. Over time, I’ve become more aware of how often we overlook the role trust plays in those decisions.
The more I researched it, the clearer it became that trust isn’t a soft concept. It’s something customers actively assess. Often before they ever reach your sales team or checkout.
Most organisations aren’t intentionally building the signals that create trust. And the ones that are tend to look at trust in a one-dimensional way, by assuming customers interpret credibility the same way they do.
They don’t.
Customers are constantly decoding signals about whether you’re reliable, fair and worth committing to. But they don’t all read those signals the same way.
That’s where the Trust Deficit really shows up.
The environment explains why it’s accelerating now.
In April, Australia’s consumer sentiment index dropped 12.5% to 80.1 — the sharpest fall since the start of the pandemic. Add rising living costs, interest rates, geopolitical instability and an information environment shaped by AI, and it’s no surprise people are becoming more careful about who they buy from.
When households feel pressure from things outside their power, they look for what they can control. Spending stops being automatic and starts being intentional.
And intentional decisions are trust decisions.
Customers today are no longer asking, Who is best?
They’re asking, Do I really trust this brand to deliver what it says it will?
Through my research, I’ve identified four universal drivers of trust customers look for before committing to a brand: clarity, consistency, fairness and proof.
But what makes this commercially powerful is something many organisations miss.
Often, depending on their generation, customers apply different filters when deciding who to believe.
Some look for evidence and reviews. Others watch how transparent you are. Some need consistency over time. Others respond to accessibility and responsiveness.
In a nutshell: Trust is built through drivers. But it’s decided through filters.
And if you don’t understand how your customers are decoding those signals, you’re leaving growth on the table.
This is exactly what I explore in my Trust Deficit keynote for 2026. How trust is built, how it’s lost and, most importantly, how organisations can start recognising what credibility actually looks like to today’s customer across different segments and generations.
Because right now, too many businesses still treat trust as something that sits inside brand reputation rather than business performance.
That’s risky.
Research shows 81% of customers won’t buy from brands they don’t trust. 89% will walk away after a breach of trust. At the same time, trust now sits alongside price and quality as one of the three biggest drivers of purchase decisions.
Trust isn’t a soft metric.
It’s a growth lever.
And the organisations willing to look more closely at how their customers are actually deciding who to believe will be the ones that win.
The organisations that understand how their customers decide who to believe will be the ones that win.