A consumer sees your TV ad during prime time. The production is polished. The message is confident. The brand feels established.
Minutes later, they search for you and land on a Reddit thread questioning your product quality. Or they ask an AI assistant for recommendations and you are not even visible.
Which signal wins?
The Old Model: Top-Down Trust
The traditional trust model was broadcast-led and brand-controlled.
Brands communicated at scale through linear tv and out-of-home media. The loudest voice often won. High share of voice created familiarity, and familiarity created trust.
This top-down approach signalled brand strength and cultural presence. It was designed for a world where consumers had limited tools to challenge or verify claims.
That world no longer exists.
The New Model: Bottom-Up Trust
Trust is now built from the ground up. It is shaped in communities, in comments sections and in peer-to-peer conversations. It is reinforced by creators, customers and AI engines synthesising public opinion.
This model builds trust more quietly. It requires patience, credibility and consistency rather than dominance.
This shift shows up in three ways:
1. Community Credibility Cannot Be Forced
Platforms like Reddit illustrate this shift clearly.
Brands cannot enter communities aggressively and expect positive reception. An overly polished or sales-driven presence is quickly rejected. The right approach is slower and more deliberate.
It starts with listening. Participating in conversations. Testing paid placements carefully. Contributing meaningful comments before attempting to lead threads.
Building credibility in these spaces can take years. It is not a short-term campaign mechanic. But when trust is earned within communities, it carries disproportionate influence because it feels authentic and peer-endorsed. In fact, 68% of UK consumers now turn to online reviews as their primary source for purchasing decisions, outstripping family recommendations and brand claims.
2. Influence Is About Synergy, Not Scale
The same principle applies to influencer marketing.
Recent IPA research highlights that the strongest performance multiplier is not the size of the influencer. It is the synergy between brand and creator. When a creator’s audience alignment, tone and credibility match the brand, performance improves significantly. In some cases, synergy has delivered a threefold multiplier effect.
This reframes influence. It is less about shouting the loudest and more about embedding the brand within trusted networks. Micro and mid-tier creators, long-term partnerships and genuine advocacy often outperform one-off macro activations.
Trust is transferred through relevance and credibility, not just reach.
3. You Are Also Building Trust With AI
There is another audience brands now need to consider: large language models and AI answer engines.
AI does not take brand claims at face value. It cross-references multiple sources. It synthesises information from editorial coverage, reviews, forums, YouTube content and owned brand materials before generating recommendations.
In this environment, visibility is the result of credibility.
Brands that are clearly articulated, consistently represented and widely validated across the open web are more likely to be surfaced positively in AI-generated answers.
This requires discipline:
- Clear and consistent core claims
- Authoritative, factual content across PR and owned channels
- Real customer proof and strong sentiment signals
- One unified narrative across paid, owned and earned touchpoints
The work is often invisible. But it determines whether a brand is recommended or overlooked.
What this means for brands
Every category has its own trust markers. In some, expert reviews dominate. In others, Reddit sentiment or creator endorsement carries greater weight. In certain categories such as Finance, AI summaries are disproportionately used.
Brands need to actively identify where validation happens in their ecosystem and invest accordingly.
This is not about abandoning brand building fundamentals. Above-the-line advertising still builds mental availability and cultural presence. AV on the “big screen” and out-of-home continue to signal scale and legitimacy.
But without bottom-up validation, that signal is fragile. Top-down awareness now needs bottom-up reinforcement. The strongest brands are those that align both models. The brands that understand this shift will not necessarily be the loudest in the room. They will be the most consistently validated.
Sources:
Intelligent CXO – https://www.intelligentcxo.com/2024/12/05/uk-consumers-rely-on-reviews-more-than-ever-despite-ai/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
IPA Cross Industry Influencer Study 2025
