Identity Trust: Why 125 Years of Marketing Just Died

0:00Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Business Lunch with your hosts, me, Roland Frazier and the wonderful Ryan Dice. For 125 years, marketers have insisted that the typical customer buying journey goes through four stages, awareness, consideration, purchase, and loyalty. But in 2025, that customer journey is all but dead. Modern customers no longer move step-by-step. Very often, the entire buying process comes down to a single moment in time that transforms into a transaction. And many of the brands that are winning right now aren't the ones with the biggest budgets or the flashiest celebs.

0:36They are the ones that know this. Fame does not equal trust. And without trust, fame doesn't sell. When you get trust right, you can collapse the customer journey and buying funnel from seeing to swiping. In this episode, we're going to break down how all of this is working. We're going to share with you the three types of trust that you need to master in order to own the trust to transaction funnel. And we're going to give you case studies, examples, and action steps to deploy the strategy to build your own trust to transaction funnels for your business, regardless of what industry you're in.

1:07Ryan, are we just hyping this traditional funnel is dead thing? Or do you think this is something that's really happening? No, I mean, I think it's all hype. I think this entire episode is just one big marketing hype fest. It's clickbait and we're not going to deliver on it at all. Yeah, no, I mean, look, I think it's safe to say that on one hand, everything has changed. And on another hand, this is how it's always been. What we've seen in the past is consumers were forced to buy a certain way because they didn't have a choice, right? If you wanted to buy something, especially in like B2B, you essentially had to go through a particular sales process.

1:47You didn't have another choice. And this was the case in a lot of consumer buying process as well. There just weren't a lot of options. If you wanted to learn about a product, you had to talk to a salesperson. You had to go into a store. There just weren't a lot of other ways to get information in the buying process. That's not the case anymore. And so I think what we're seeing right now is just consumers doing what they've always wanted to do now that they have the ability to do it. So on one hand, everything has changed. On the other hand, it's no different at all. So the changes in the funnel and the kind of starting with trust being an important thing.

2:31I wanted to kind of talk about it in the context of, we talk about trust agents in advertising that you get somebody that's famous, we've done it for our events, you get somebody that's really well known, you do it to sell products. And that person basically says, hey, I use this and therefore you should too, because I'm famous. That still works, but the risk is just so giant. And an example I thought that was good is Sydney Sweeney in the recent American Eagle ads. So American Eagle's a denim and apparel retailer for those of you who don't know. And what the ad said was Sydney Sweeney delivers this pun and she says, jeans are passed down from parents to offspring.

3:15My jeans are blue. Sydney Sweeney has great jeans. That's the thing. And it's, you know, so she's selling blue jeans making the pun on jeans. It's a double entendre, if you will. Right. So, you know, critics, you know, it was controversial, which is definitely good, I think, these days. Critics, of course, they're always everywhere. They saw eugenics undertones, you know, racism, maybe culture, you know, culture kind of flared up over it. Trump praised the ad, you know, academics slammed it, but the results were undeniable. 700 ,000 new customers, 40 billion impressions, and the stock goes up 30 to 38%.

3:56I mean, that's pretty powerful. And I don't know what they paid her, but let's say it was a few million bucks. I mean, worth it, right? But the challenges are, what if you don't have millions of dollars? What if somebody like Sidney Sweeney doesn't seem like a fit for your ad. And, um, and what if it doesn't work and you just end up like many companies that spent the wad on a Superbowl ad. And then that was kind of like, you know, what's your business plan? Superbowl. Um, so I guess a couple of questions, but let's start Ryan. Why would you say that this kind of controversial campaign worked instead of imploding like the, uh, what was it?

4:39Kendall Jenner with the Pepsi ad that just like, you know, blew up and they took it down almost overnight. Well, I think for one timing wise, just culturally speaking right now, we're sort of beyond this, this cancel culture, you know, phase. Also alignment wise, Kendall Jenner was more aligned with being more progressive. And I think Sidney Sweeney is more like, I don't care what you think about me. I'm going to do what I want to do. So and I think what this speaks to is from a brand perspective, you know, the A word authenticity. You need to make sure that whatever you're doing, whatever you're putting out there, it does need to be authentic.

5:16It needs to be aligned to your overall brand positioning. But we don't what we don't know about the Kendall Jenner ad that you're referring to. And just for those who don't know, this was a Pepsi ad where I believe it was there was a there was a big protest. Yeah. And this was during like basically in the middle of the George Floyd protests. And it was like protesters and police, right? And she solves it all with a Pepsi. Oh, yeah. I mean, so in addition to all things I mentioned before, just about as tone deaf as you could get from a timing perspective. And then you get Kendall Jenner saying, like, we can solve all of our differences with a Pepsi.

5:55Like, kind of also just gross. So bad messaging, bad positioning, bad timing, everything, you know, everything pretty much done wrong there. but what I'll tell you is in both of those cases and what we do need to figure out is if you want to get out there you do need to create attention like that is one of the things that has not changed yeah you absolutely cannot post funnel pre-funnel whatever we're calling this phase right now you can't get anything going unless you generate some kind of attention and it is harder than ever to do that. It just is. And so I applaud any brand that's bold enough to do what American Eagle did.

6:39So would you have taken the bet? Would you have spent a significant budget on something like that if you were running American Eagle? I don't know what percentage of their marketing budget it was, but yeah. I mean, compared what they're doing to what Gap is doing, which is the same bland, boring people dancing on a TV thing that they've been doing the whole time. If it's not different, if it's not unique, it's just noise. It reminds me most advertising, you remember the little like Charlie Brown cartoons when the parents would talk and it was just wah, wah, wah, wah. That is the majority of advertising today.

7:18It's not unique and so it doesn't cut through at all. So I think you have to ask yourself anytime you're going to put out any sort of messaging, what are we going to do that's going to cause this to cut through the noise? And the answer can't be, well, let's just do what we've always done, because that is an instant failure right off the bat. I thought what was also cool about this is to me, it was a safer bet because it was very, very similar to the Brooke Shields ad for Calvin Klein that was super controversial. that was something like nothing comes between me and my Calvins or something like that.

7:54And like wearing underwear, yeah, like down, down to the post, like down to the poses and everything. It's like, so they kind of reinvented an ad that was wildly successful before that was quite controversial and then just did that again. So it's not like it was a cold, hey, let's, let's just throw it out there and hope it works. I feel like it, it had a little bit of basis as well. And I do think a good question to ask is when we put this out there, who's going to be pissed off? And if the answer is nobody, then that's a problem because love me or hate me, there's no money in between. I mean, the opposite of love is hate.

8:34It's apathy. And so what we've got to make sure of today, if we're creating brands and if we want to generate attention is that we're not just creating noise and we're not just creating apathy. And it doesn't mean, and we've talked about this before, it doesn't mean that we're simply being controversial for the sake of being controversial, but take a stand, have a unique point of view on something and let it be something that is authentic to your brand and something that you actually believe. You have to start from that point or you'll never break through. So let's break down why something like this works.

9:09Why does having someone like a Sydney Sweeney work? And so this is kind of the three things that we're going to talk about. And then how does this ultimately collapse the customer journey? We're really breaking down how having Sydney Sweeney in your ad works. Say again? We're really going to break down why having Sydney Sweeney in your ad works. Yeah, we are. It's identity trust, right? So how do they relate to, what is the whole point of a trust agent? And the bottom line is like seeing yourself in the story is identity trust. Now, you might not see yourself in the Sidney Sweeney ad because that was basically just really an appeal to celebrity.

9:53But you do need to have this identity trust. And so a few examples that would be worth mentioning here, I think Depop is one. That's a social resale app, kind of like Instagram and eBay, where mostly Gen Z people buy and sell secondhand fashion. Their ad said Depopleganger. And there was a red sweater that was unraveling across a city that connected one wearer to a stranger that had the same sweater. And the tagline was where taste recognizes taste. And the meaning wasn't buy this sweater. It was find your people. eBay did an ad when it first came out. I still remember the ad because I thought it was so cool.

10:38It was somebody that was selling a green Gremlin automobile. and they're like, nobody's going to, you know, they're like people teasing and all, nobody's going to want that ugly, nasty thing. And then somebody looks at the end and they go, Oh my God, it's a green gremlin. Like it's the thing they were looking for. To me, it's the same thing that like you see this thread of commonality of let's find something that worked before and then let's adapt it. I think that's a form of the trust of seeing yourself in the story. if you saw the Brooke Shields ad and then you saw the Sidney Sweeney ad, you could not help but connect them.

11:15If you see the DePoppelganger ad and you saw the eBay Gremlin ad, you can't help but connect them, even if it's subconsciously, which I think then kind of feels comfortable. And therefore this identity, this trust, this, you know, you see yourself in the ad. But the idea with both the gremlin thing for eBay and this depoppleganger thing is, you know, there's, I know I've got my people, right? And that I identify with that and it feels really good that, you know, it's just seeing yourself in something, in some product or in someone else is so powerful that it can actually drive sales and that it drives sales instantly.

12:03if you're on a shoppable platform or you can get to it quickly, which is the collapse of the customer journey. What are your thoughts about that? Well, I mean, it goes back to something we've always said, which is businesses should not be defined by the products they sell or how they sell them. They should be defined by the people they serve. And so in all of these examples, they were really clear on, you know, this is the type of person that we serve. And then we're about helping you find more people like you. And I think that that is so incredibly critical. and what I believe and part of the reason that that Sidney Sweeney ad worked and why it really got traction.

12:38When you had this group, the academics, whether you want to call them the woke folks, whatever that group is, when they came out in protest of the ad, instantly then everybody else who sees themselves in opposition to that group now came out in support of the ad. And these are people who before probably could have cared less about Sidney Sweeney or, you know, American Eagle. Like they didn't care at all. But now that these people are against it, they're instantly for it. And so this is why being intentional about the choices that you make, saying, who is this going to piss off when you choose to piss off a particular group?

13:20very often, you know, the, the, the, you know, enemy of my enemies, my friend kind of thing. Like you're, you're oftentimes then choosing who you're going to include. Yeah. And, and so just to, toward the theme of collapsing the customer journeys, you know, around that it takes a long time to get comfortable with a brand and then make a decision to buy some examples. There's Hiram Yarbrough, uh, who was an unknown skincare TikToker, uh, his CeraVe, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it right, but routines went viral, driving an 89 % sales surge and sellouts everywhere. He wasn't famous. So why did people trust him more than a celebrity?

14:00Like why is sometimes not having a celebrity, having an average person that nobody knows the thing that works? Well, I mean, one, if I see this person and I trust them, then that's in many cases better than a celebrity, especially today. But think about the opportunities that we have as consumers that we did not have before. If I see somebody and I see them talking about a product and that product looks interesting, I develop an initial trust factor. And that takes me from like maybe a zero to a four or a five. But then what I have the ability to do is I have the ability to go online and do my own research and I have the ability to content binge.

14:42And so I can go from like a four or five from a trust factor to an eight, nine, 10 in an afternoon. Whereas before that would have required me to drive to the store, to request a brochure, to go through all of these steps that just would have taken a long, long time. And so again, I think what we're seeing, it's less about people. I think people are going through the exact same steps that they would have gone through before, it's just been compressed. And so that's what I think we're seeing. Yeah. So a couple other examples, there's a pink sauce, Miami chef, chef pie or P posted neon pink dipping sauce videos, went viral, millions of order, got Walmart distribution.

15:28Poppy started as mother, apple cider vinegar soda, got turned down on Shark Tank. Her husband filmed the wife's gut health story in a TikTok video. It went viral. They got a very smart person that came in and rebranded it from Mother, which was the product's name, to Poppy, P-O-P-P-I. They scaled retail. PepsiCo acquired them for just under$2 billion this year. And then Glossier. They couldn't have gotten all the way up to$2 billion. I mean, I feel bad. You know, it's like, give me an extra five. Come on, guys. Glossier direct to consumer beauty brand, uh, skincare and makeup born from a blog, uh, built almost entirely on UGC, which is user generated content, uh, ordinary customers, photos, and routines became the marketing and, um, 70 % of sales, uh, in were influenced by peer content.

16:23So, I mean, it's like, I think the examples are, you know, are plenty and, um, And it's just shows, I think, the importance of this identity, trust, authenticity, like you said, the authenticity of the people that we're talking about here, telling their story, sharing their experience of truly using or consuming the product and the benefits that it creates for them. And then instant distributive access, right? You've got to be able to buy the thing then while you're in the heat of being impressed by it. that could be as remote as a link in bio or as direct as shoppable content. Right. And I think that's so important.

17:07And we're testing this right now across a number of our portfolio companies. What if we just make it easier for people to give us money? What if we just reduce the friction? It doesn't have to be necessarily an order link all over the place and in people's faces. and we don't have to do a call to action everywhere where we're always selling because it's not always appropriate to necessarily have a direct call to action in everything that you do. That can be obnoxious. But all too often, businesses basically hide the ability to buy. They hide their pricing. They hide everything and they make it hard for folks to buy because we wanted to force people to go through the same old channels.

17:52It's just not how it works anymore. So we're shifting it to, hey, when you're ready, if you're interested, there's a link. And if they keep clicking through, then eventually we're going to give them the opportunity to buy things that before we never thought folks would just buy on their own. Particularly if you're a SaaS company, please listen to this because there's so many times that we've wanted to buy software and we're ready to buy. And then it said you had to schedule a demo and we just went and found somebody else that you didn't have to do that with because it's just a terrible process.

18:19It's incredibly inconvenient. it. What about examples of when this trust thing is done wrong and backfires? Anything come to mind? I mean, yeah. Obviously, the Bud Light, Dylan Mulvaney, I mean, whatever you think. And I don't, we're apolitical and this is not a political show, so we don't want to get into the whole trans debate. But if you are Bud Light and your consumer, you know, I mean, a Bud Light drinker is a Bud Light drinker and you decide, hey, let's have our trust agent be a trans influencer. That is not a good decision. Like you, you don't, and you don't have to be anti-trans to just say, this is not an ideal decision for the brand.

19:07I think it would be akin to selling, to selling, you know, women's products to men, like, like, you know, to running, I don't know, a tampon commercial to a bunch of guys at a wrestling match. It's like, it's just, it's just not a fit. Yeah. Right. I mean, it, it, it just doesn't make sense. And I think it also like kind of insulted the people that it was so tone deaf on who the people were that like, Like, you know, if you identify as a dude that drinks Bud Light and is, you know, shooting guns and riding around and pickup trucks and stuff like that, you're probably not as open to a trans influencer.

19:53You know, it's just it's just kind of stupid marketing. Right. They they they just they I think the people felt betrayed. They felt like either they were being. Yeah. played, you know, or, or just betrayed, like, it's just, why did, did that decision get made to, you know, why are you trying to, it was almost like, I guess it would be more akin probably to, um, running conservative ads for Donald Trump to, uh, academics constantly. You know, it's just the same thing as like, have Donald Trump endorse, you know, I don't know what Harvard, uh, it just doesn't, it's not the right fit. That's why they call it a trust agent.

20:39Who will your audience trust? They didn't trust Dylan Mulvaney, right? Doesn't have anything to do necessarily with even being a trend. They just didn't trust this person, right? Yeah. I mean, yeah, I'm sure that there are plenty of Bud Light drinkers who had no particular opinion, you know, on that. They're like, you know, look, you do your life, live your thing. I mean, a lot of these folks are going to be pretty, you know, libertarian on that particular thing. But they're like, why is this person been selling me my beer. Because again, when you make these choices, you're choosing who are you going to piss off.

21:07And if what you're, if the choice that you're making on who you're going to piss off is the customers you already have, well, that's fine. If you're, if you feel really, really, really confident that you can completely replace the ones that you have with a larger group of new folks, or if you're just saying, we don't want them anymore. And that is effectively what that head of market, what that brand manager said, they're like, you know, our product isn't just for like the, you know, for the frat bros and the whatever. And, and essentially said, we don't want them anymore. Yeah. Which, which was a great decision.

21:44Sales down, sales down 25 to 30%. Modelo takes number one, 20 billion lost in market cap. Yeah. That's a pretty powerful decision. Said you're fired. So you, you are so fired. So freaking fired. Yeah. So I just think, again, businesses are not defined by the products they sell or the way they sell them. They're defined by the people they serve. And if you're going to take over a brand like Bud Light, you should make it clear before you step into that role that I don't want to serve the people that we serve right now. And I can't be in this role if you're going to ask me to serve these people. If I'm going to take in this role, then I want to take the brand in a completely new direction.

22:23Right? And make that clear on the front end. So anyway, just. Yeah, it really is. What I was going to say is we did make that decision recently. We decided that we wanted to move from kind of nine to five W2 people to more higher level business owners in one of our businesses. And we didn't, though, want to give up the market that we had. We just changed who we were targeting and targeted those people with different messages. is we didn't target the new message to the old people to say, we don't want you. We didn't betray them. We didn't like throw it up in their face. We just like, we're just not marketing to that segment anymore.

23:07We're still serving them. We're still talking to them, you know, and the messaging that we're sending out isn't, Hey, this isn't for you. We're now supporting this thing that, you know, is anathematic to you. We, we are actually, um, just simply targeting these people. And I don't, I think it's innocuous. I don't think anybody sees it and thinks, you know, they're, they've been betrayed and we didn't decide we just want to get rid of all these people. We still want them. We still want to support them. Um, this one was just, just kind of crazy. So let's, let's break down. Um, you use the word anathematic.

23:41You like that? I don't think I've ever heard that word in my entire life. Oh, it's a great word. I like that word a lot. What does that word mean? Oh, it's something that's an anathema. Okay. I know that word. It's the opposite of, right? Just it's the opposite of, but kind of in a aggressive way. You teach me something every day, Roland Frazier. Thank you. So let's talk about an action play for this. So how to. Here, our goal is we want to recruit mirror customers, the customers that people see themselves in. That's what we mean by mirror customers. So these are going to be our trust agents. Record 30 to 60 stories, have an allow list, boost the best posts, and then track our customer acquisition costs.

24:32The shortcut framework here we call mirror, micro, and media. So the mirror is find a customer that truly looks, feels, or lives like your ideal buyer, your ideal customer. the same demographic, the same lifestyle, the same pain points that they're experiencing. Then the micro is use a micro creator, somebody that's got like a thousand to 50 ,000 followers, subscribers, et cetera, or even just a regular customer. And their small audience trusts them way more than a celebrity, right? The celebrity is generally known now to be a shill, a paid endorser. And then the media part is don't just post it, but actually add paid media, you know, boost it, put a little bit of a little bit of ad spend behind it so that the message scales beyond the natural reach of that influencer customer person.

25:23And so that that's kind of the plan. And I've got a hypothetical, but I'd love to get your take on that mirror micromedia kind of plan. Yeah, I love it. I would I would tweak it. And I think that this fits with it to say if it can be who they who your ideal person aspires to be. So they can be just one level up, but not so far in the distance. And I think that this is another one of the challenges with celebrities is people look at it and they go, yeah, but that's Ryan Reynolds. Yeah, but that's, you know, that, right. It's always somebody out there. So you're going to get what you get from a celebrity is scroll stopping power.

26:03And there is a brand elevation to it, where it's like, oh, well, if this person is aligned with this brand, this brand must be a big deal. So you do get that. And there is some trust that comes along with it, but you don't have to have it. I think if you can compound enough trust agents that are these micro influencers that you're describing, and they're just one level up, that's what you're looking for in these folks, not 10 levels up, because now I don't believe that I can do that. but they're just kind of one or two steps beyond where your ideal is. I think that's the perfect formula. I like that.

26:41I like that tweak a lot. So here's a hypothetical example, and then let's get your critique on this. So Boutique Gym wants to lower their customer acquisition costs. So they recruit, step one, they recruit three members that represent their target customers, like busy parents, 40 to 50 years old. Step two, film 30 to 60 second selfie videos where those people explain, I'm 45, two kids in this class got me back in shape, basically, something along those lines, but maybe a little more story to it. Step three, post all three videos natively, meaning going through the app like Instagram or YouTube or whatever.