Breaking trust

I’ve been thinking about how companies build consumer trust. Until I read about trust thermocline: “a point which, once crossed, otherwise healthy businesses and products suddenly collapse.”

In oceans at a certain depth the temperature gets suddenly very cold. That’s a thermocline (it’s explained in the article). It’s a great analogy.

Slowly, Then Suddenly: How Products Fail (Every / Gareth Edwards)

At its simplest, the trust thermocline represents the point at which a consumer decides that the mental cost of staying with a product is outweighed by their desire to abandon it. This may seem like an obvious problem, yet if that were the case, this behavior wouldn’t happen so frequently in technology businesses and in more traditional firms that prided themselves on consumer loyalty, such as car manufacturers and retail chains.

These collapses happen because most businesses fail to properly understand how a reliance on emotional engagement changes the way consumer trust in their product works. That reliance is particularly common with digital products or social media, where personal image, follower count, and “influencer” behavior are a critical part of the user experience.

This video by Poseidon Entertainment uses trust thermocline to analyze how Disney’s lack of creativity with their IP, increasing prices for theme parks, and other cost cutting measures are eroding trust:

Following the same theme of trust, on Monday Ben Thompson in Stratechery explains the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank by way of a trust dividend. With trust gone, regulation will change the playing field.

Before the events of last week the U.S. benefited from a banking trust dividend: businesses technically should have been worried about money that exceeded the $250,000 insurance limit, but in practice few gave it much concern. This made their operations more efficient, and made money more widely available for banks to lend. Regional banks, meanwhile, got away with lower capital requirements and less regulation, making it easier to extend credit and offer bespoke services. The FDIC, meanwhile, charged relatively low fees of member banks because it was only insuring $250,000 per account, even though its presence made the overall system much safer and more reliable for accounts of all sizes. That trust dividend is now gone, and the costs of replacing trust with explicit rules and regulations will accumulate forevermore.

💩 Cool shit

Cloud watching - A daytime only website. It’s surprisingly fun to draw a cloud and watch others go by.

Rotating sandwiches - It’s rotating sandwiches. What’s not to like?

MissJourney - AI image generators are male-biased. This one celebrates women.

BeatBot - This is pretty neat. Describe a song and it will generate a beat and lyrics. Like this one it made for me about eating the best burger.

Centuries of Sound - An audio mix for every year of recorded sound, 1859 to the present.

Calligrapher.ai - Generate calligraphy.

World Data Visualization Prize 2023 - There’s some truly wonderful data viz here.

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