Communication Strategies in a Skeptical World

Lauren Sergy, Up Front Communication

Tone-deaf corporate marketing campaigns. Impenetrable press releases from institutions and agencies. Ill-thought-out posts from public figures on Twitter (sorry, “X”). These are just a few examples of public-facing communication blunders writ large. These aren’t the only types of mistakes picking away at public trust in communication. Misinformation and disinformation run rampant. Deepfake technology and artificial intelligence makes it difficult for us to tell if what we’re reading or watching is human or not. Polarized news and the rise of populism has made nuanced conversation difficult, and mistrust in institutions and media is at an all-time high.

Despite all this, cultivating trust with consumers is still within our reach. It takes time, attention, and effort to do so, but the benefits are enormous. Trust makes communication easier. It helps people pay attention to our message. It increases our persuasiveness and ability to get buy-in. It lets people give us the benefit of the doubt when we say something they don’t immediately agree with or present information that challenges them in some way. There are many communication strategies that specifically help build trust, and three principles especially useful are empathy, disinterest, and collaboration.

Empathy is the ability to understand someone’s context and views. If people are to trust us, they need to feel seen, they must believe that we understand and even share some (though not all) of their views and values. To demonstrate empathy in our communication, we need to appreciate our audience’s worldview – the lenses through which they filter information. Worldviews are made up of biases and beliefs about the way the world works. We can get a grasp of our audience’s worldviews by considering the different factors affecting how they interpret the world around them, such as their experiences, cultures, roles, worries, needs, and ideologies. Once we get an idea of what is shaping our audiences’ worldview, we can make communication choices specifically suited to that audience. We can frame our ideas, adjust our language, and reflect the values that will make it easier for them to take our message in. By doing so, we get to demonstrate our empathy and give them the sense that we “get” where they’re coming from.

Disinterest is another communication strategy worth leveraging. This term comes from the world of rhetoric. It’s part of your ethos – the audience’s perception of a person’s or organization’s character, goodwill, judgement, and everything else that marks you as the kind of person they believe is trustworthy. Disinterest is when we demonstrate our caring and goodwill towards others by focusing on their needs and concerns, even when there’s no obvious benefit to you. We can show disinterest by framing our points around our audience’s need, speaking to and about them. We can also demonstrate it by speaking about organizations, causes, and issues other than our own, such as a cause that is important to a different sector, or a research project another institution has put out which isn’t directly related to us. Attention is precious, and when we show disinterest, we are generously giving our share of attention over to something else for the sake of helping our audience. When you do this regularly, your audience’s belief that you care about them grows, and so does their trust.

Collaboration is a powerful trust-building tool. Audience trust grows when they see our message shared across different channels and repeated by other people or organizations they already trust. Collaboration doesn’t need to be complicated. We can collaborate with partner organizations by quoting one another in our articles, sharing other association’s content with our audience, creating new content together, and appearing alongside other agricultural organizations in various media. It’s important to look beyond obvious alliances and start collaborations with communication partners your audience wouldn’t necessarily expect. This not only makes the collaborative piece more attention grabbing and noticeable, it also makes it more likely your message will reach new eyes and ears.

Creating communication that builds trust takes time and effort to create. But when you put in that time and effort, you’ll be able to reach new minds and engage new audiences. When we leverage the principles of empathy, disinterest, and collaboration, we add serious fuel to our communication fire. Canadians need to trust their food producers. Canadians need to trust agriculture. You can cultivate that trust. So get out there, and work together to make your message heard.