A decade of sharper targeting and cleaner attribution has made marketers easy to ignore, argues a new Adweek piece. People decide on emotion and justify with logic, and trust is the real driver of purchase. The moments that build it are the ones you cannot measure, which is exactly why they get neglected.
Anyone can copy your product, your pricing and your media plan. No one can copy how people feel about you.
Marketers have spent a decade building smarter funnels, sharper targeting and cleaner attribution. They know exactly who to reach, when to reach them and what a click costs. They have also never been easier to ignore. A new Adweek piece argues the reason is uncomfortable. The problem is not bad marketing. It is that customers do not trust brands, and you cannot optimise your way out of that.
The argument runs against the grain of how most teams operate. The industry has become obsessed with what is measurable, clicks, conversions and cost per acquisition, because those are the numbers that fit in a dashboard. People do not make decisions that way. They decide on emotion and justify with logic afterwards. On the Edelman Trust Barometer, trust ranks among the strongest drivers of a purchase, ahead of awareness or consideration.
Trust is not a soft metric you get to ignore. It lowers your cost to acquire, lifts how often customers come back, and gives you permission to grow. It is the thing that makes the rest of your marketing actually work. Without it, every other lever gets more expensive.
The catch is that the moments that build trust are the ones you cannot easily measure. The tone of the person who greets your customer. The clarity of your pricing. The way you handle something going wrong. None of that shows up cleanly in an attribution report, which is precisely why it gets starved of attention.
Why it matters
For Australian businesses, this is a warning against optimisation as a substitute for substance. You can spend years tuning a funnel that funnels people toward a brand they do not believe in, and wonder why the cost per acquisition keeps climbing. The funnel is not the problem. The trust gap at the end of it is.
This does not mean abandon measurement. It means stop pretending the measurable things are the only things that matter. The unmeasurable moments are often the ones doing the heavy lifting.
Trust ranks among the strongest drivers of purchase decisions on the Edelman Trust Barometer, ahead of awareness and consideration
What to do about it
The brands that win the next decade will be the ones that remembered marketing was about belief long before it was about attribution.