Trust-Led Marketing with Schneider Electric and Thoughtworks

Does your audience trust you?

Only 21% of UK adults say that they have never lost trust in a brand in a YouGov poll – with 35% of respondents reporting that they have lost trust in a company due to unethical business practices, and 28% saying the same of misleading advertising. 

Losing audience trust can have serious consequences for a company – with 66% of respondents saying that they boycott brands that have lost their trust.

To ensure consumers trust a brand, its messaging has to be linked to its core brand purpose, says Julie Woods-Moss, Chief Marketing Officer of Thoughtworks.

“Most organisations decide what they want to be known for, then write toward it,” she says. “We do the opposite – start with what's already true and build the narrative forward from there.”

Yakov Danilevskiy, VP of Global Marketing, Services Division, at Schneider Electric, agrees. 

“Purpose-led storytelling is still about one question,” he says. “What does this person need to hear, and does the answer trace back to what the business actually does?”

To build campaigns rooted in trust, organisations must make sure that brand purpose is authentically embedded into every aspect of the company – instead of just the marketing function.

Building brand trust

As consumers become more and more perceptive, marketing teams are having to ensure their company’s brand purpose is felt across the organisation. 

According to Julia, the simplest test for measuring whether a brand narrative is rooted in actual operations is by seeing if any other company could tell the same story. 

“If you swap out the logo and the narrative still holds, that's positioning – not purpose,” she says.

“Audiences have become very good at spotting the difference. This makes storytelling harder, especially now. In an era of AI-generated content, where volume is cheap and fabrication is easy, brands have to work harder to cut through – and to give employees the tools to authentically elevate their voice.”

But what does that work look like in practice? 

While bridging the gap between superficial messaging and actual business operations can make a huge difference in the way an audience perceives a brand, many marketing teams aren’t actually involved in core business practices. 

And when marketing teams are operating in isolation, they often have to default to creating superficial ‘positioning’ – crafting a narrative that exists mainly on the surface instead of embedding purpose directly into the business model.

This disconnect leads to messaging that feels detached from the company's actual conduct, which modern audiences are increasingly adept at filtering out.

“Where marketing leaders run into difficulty is when the impact narrative gets constructed independently of the business model and then attached to it,” says Yakov.

“Commercial pressure will always pull in one direction and purpose in another. Yet when purpose is built into the operating model, the marketing narrative writes itself.”

To make sure an environmental or social impact narrative is actually embedded in a company’s operations, Julia says she applies an “operational test,” to see how these narratives play out. 

“The question I keep asking is: where is this visible outside of marketing? If the honest answer is nowhere, then you don't have an impact narrative, you have an aspiration in creative clothing,” she says.

“The operational test I apply is simple: does this show up in how people are hired, how suppliers are chosen, how the company responds when things go wrong? Those are the things that determine credibility. 

“Publishing actual data rather than curated case studies also matters. It's easy to tell a compelling story about your commitments; it's much harder to publish the numbers that would contradict you if you weren't being honest.” 

When brand narratives actually are grounded in concrete, verifiable metrics, it becomes much easier for marketing teams to align their external messaging with the realities of the business – allowing organisations to build genuine, trust-based relationships.

According to Yakov, who has spent more than 13 years helping to build marketing and go-to-market strategies at Schneider Electric, this is particularly important when it comes to branding around corporate sustainability. 

“The moment a sustainability narrative becomes abstract, it loses its credibility,” he says.

“The brands that build lasting trust are willing to be precise: what has been reduced, what has lasted longer, what has performed measurably better. The difference between what has been achieved and what is being built towards matters. Those are different claims and conflating them is how purpose-led marketing earns its bad reputation.”

Brand growth vs brand purpose

However, marketing teams can often be hesitant to bring in new, experimental marketing strategies – particularly when marketing budgets are so often at risk.

According to the CMO Survey, when profits fall short of expectations, 53.1% of company executives focus on cutting expenses, with marketing expenses cut 45.4% of the time. 

Perhaps because of this, marketing executives are often having to prove value and brand growth. The survey finds that 70.6% of marketers are focused on short-term impact rather than long-term gains, while 47.1% are returning to established strategies. 

But these two priorities – impact and growth – shouldn’t be pitted against each other. 

“A brand’s environmental and social impact narrative and its commercial growth are not competing priorities – they are the same story, enabled by technology, told at different levels of resolution,” says Yakov.

“When a company’s values and its technology are embedded in how it operates rather than layered on top, you’re not managing two narratives. You’re finding the right language to make one coherent story land with different audiences.”

Julia agrees, noting that: “When impact and commercial growth feel like competing priorities, it usually means the impact work was added on top of a commercial strategy rather than being part of the same logic from the start.”

Despite this, she believes that it’s “worth being honest,” about the fact that building brand purpose campaigns can have a “real commercial cost”.

“We're past the point where a purpose-led campaign is low-risk because it's broadly well-intentioned,” she says.

”Consumers are actively skeptical, not just indifferent, but looking for the gap between the claim and the reality. A campaign that overpromises on impact doesn't just fail to land; it can damage trust and that damage can compound.”

Measuring the success of purpose-led marketing 

When it comes to gaining genuine insights from a purpose-led campaign, seeing a real impact can be challenging. 

In fact, only 36% of marketers say they feel confident in accurately measuring their return on investment (ROI), according to industry insights from Firework – which is particularly important when the same insights show that 64% of companies base future marketing budgets on past ROI performance. 

This can be even more challenging when it comes to measuring more vague metrics like ‘trust,’ which can often have no measurable business impact.

“Campaign metrics tell you the message landed – not whether it built anything lasting,” says Yakov. 

Instead, companies often have to look a little closer to see the tangible impact that an increase in brand trust can have on performance. 

“Are we gaining ground with new audiences? Are customers referencing our narrative back to us in commercial conversations? Is the message coherent enough to hold up from a CMO who wants to understand what we stand for, to a technical director who needs to understand how our systems perform under pressure?” Yakov explains. 

“Success shows up in whether customers move from transactional to ongoing partnership – reactive to predictive, one-off to recurring. That’s an honest measure of whether the purpose narrative worked. Not that it resonated. That it changed how people chose to work with us.”

This can show up for companies in a range of ways – such as increased customer lifetime value and significantly lower churn rates. When a brand can successfully establish trust, it can reduce the friction often found in customer decision-making processes – helping marketing teams build a deeper, long-term commitment with audiences. 

For Julia, one of the most important KPIs to watch out for when measuring the impact of a purpose led campaign is talent signals – or whether employees feel that “the external brand story” matches their lived experience.

“When that internal-external alignment breaks down, it shows up first in hiring and attrition,” she explains.

“The internal alignment also has an outward effect. When employees believe in the brand story, it shows up in how they talk about the company – whether it’s in conversations with clients, at industry events or how they represent the business day to day.”

This kind of organic employee advocacy, she says, as a “stronger signal than any formal campaign metric,” because it comes from a truly genuine place. 

“The underlying principle: purpose-led platforms should compound over time,” Julia says. “If a narrative only works within a single campaign cycle, it probably wasn't deeply rooted in the business to begin with.”

Yakov agrees.

“I’ve built marketing strategies across international markets – and what strikes me is that the language of purpose changes considerably,whether that’s how sustainability, impact or value are framed,” he concludes. “But the underlying expectation is consistent: people want to know that you mean it.”