43. The Trust Recession And Your PR Advantage

Trust has bottomed out. People have been burned by gurus, courses that didn't deliver and "experts" who were making it up as they went along. The old ways of doing things aren't working in the same way anymore - you can't just post on Instagram and expect clients to roll in.

But here's the thing: while everyone else is panicking about the trust recession, you can be building real, earned trust. And that's your biggest competitive advantage right now.

In this episode, I break down:

Why we're in a trust recession:

• The guru era fallout and why people have been burned
• The post-2020 shift and what's changed economically and culturally
• Why the traditional business growth tactics of the past 5 years are dying
• The AI factor making it harder to know what's real

The four ways PR builds trust when trust is scarce:

• Third party endorsement - why someone else saying you're good matters more than ever (and the psychology behind it)
• Building your personal profile so people feel like they know you before they hire you
• Word of mouth and recommendations - the most trusted form of marketing, especially now
• Human connection in an AI world - being provably human is your competitive advantage

This isn't just about visibility. It's about credibility. It's about building a reputation that actually means something when nobody's handing out their trust for free.

The trust recession is real - but it's also your biggest opportunity if you're willing to do the work to earn it.

And once you've had a listen you can:

- Follow me on instagram @pippa_the.pr.set or LinkedIn (@Pippa Goulden) for more tips and insight into the world of PR

- Join my DIY PR membership using the code POD50 to get 50% off your first month - this will give you all the knowledge and confidence you need to get results for yourself. Have a look here

- Work with me 1-2-1 in Kickstart: The PR Accelerator which is a hyper-focused, action-taking, results focused programme that's all about getting you great PR results for your business, with me supporting you all the way.

- Join the waitlist for my next Get Known Sprint Spring '26 here

- Or if you just want to hand it all over to me to do for you, I can do that too

Find out more at www.theprset.com and book a discovery call with me to chat more here or email me pippa@theprset.com

Transcript

Please note this transcript was created using AI - apologies for any mistakes

Pippa Goulden (00:43)
Hello and welcome back to PR Made Simple. Today I am talking about something that has come up in various conversations with my clients, my one-to-one accelerators, within the membership and also within the mastermind I'm in. It's something that we've been discussing a lot and that is the trust recession that we are seeing in the business world at the moment. My mastermind, we are a

group of business owners, all doing different things in different industries. But this is something that we've all been noticing in the way that we sell, what we're doing, the feedback that we're getting from our clients. It's the same shift that's happening across various different industries. And it's

And I don't mean that people are being just a bit more cautious. I mean, trust in lots of areas has properly bottomed out. People have been burned. They've been sold to by gurus who've disappeared. They've bought courses that didn't deliver. They've worked with experts who were making it up as they went along. Trust is at an all time low. But here's the thing

That creates a massive opportunity for those of us who are willing to do the work to actually build it, to build genuine trust around the fact that we are very good at what we do. And if you're not thinking about this in your PR strategy, in your wider part of getting known for what you do, then I really want you to use this time now to rethink about how you can

build your profile, get known for what you do and in that process, build trust, build credibility, get out there, get known for what you do because there are so many opportunities for you as the expert, as the founder, as the person who knows what they are doing to build that trust with your target audience and it is more important now than it has

ever been before in the history of, well, at least me running my business over the last five years. So I'm going to look now at why this has happened, what opportunities that presents for you, and then how PR can help you to build trust and authority and build that back with your clients, customers in the right way.

So let's look a little bit more about the trust recession, What's actually happened? I think it goes back to COVID. I mean, most things do, don't they? But so many people have been really badly burned. The guru era, as I will call it.

did some serious damage. People threw thousands of pounds at courses, coaches, masterminds that promised the world. And what did they get? Maybe a PDF and a Facebook group, maybe a disappearing host, maybe a few Zoom calls. We've been sold to by people who've been in business for five minutes, who don't have an expertise in what they claim to have it in. And suddenly they're teaching everyone else how to do it.

and lots of us fell for it in lots of different ways. And then I think also within the context of that, there's the post 2020 fallout. We spent a lot of time online during COVID, didn't we? everyone became some sort of business coach overnight. but that polish wore off pretty quickly. We can spot the bullshit now, can't we?

we've developed a good radar for it and people talk much more openly about it. People are much more open to admitting that they've been burnt, that they threw money at something and it didn't work. And so we're hearing many more conversations around things that haven't worked out for people. Whereas before they might have hidden it in a bit of embarrassment. We've come to an age now where we're actually much more open.

and honest about things that are going on behind the scenes in our business, things that we've spent money on that haven't worked for us and as a result it's made us all much more cautious about where we're spending money. That trust, automatic trust that people built up through social media is much more difficult to get now and also we've got to remember that we are in a completely different economic climate now too.

We've got the cost of living crisis, political chaos, AI is a factor which is making us question what's real, what's not. You can't just throw money at problems anymore. People need to know that they are going to work. They need to know that you are going to work for them, that what you have to offer is going to work for them. They need the proof. The trust has evaporated. People want to know who you're working with. You want to deep dive a lot more.

before you spend that money on anybody that you're potentially gonna be working with. They want to know that you're legit, that you've done the work, that you've actually got results and that you're not gonna disappear in three months when the next shiny trend comes along. We are done with quick fixes. The trust isn't there anymore. And so therefore as a business owner, you need to look at ways that you can be building that trust with your target audience.

and the other piece of the trust puzzle is that the old way of doing things isn't working anymore. You can't just post on Instagram and expect your clients and customers to roll in. You can't rely on one webinar funnel that you built in 2020 to do the hard work for you. That just showing up on social media isn't cutting the mustard anymore.

It's very, very noisy out there. It's a very crowded room that you're playing in and people don't have that trust in the same way that they did. So those traditional ways that people have grown businesses in the past five years, they're just not working in the same way for many people So here is the opportunity for you. And this is almost, we've gone from like a trust recession to what I'm calling a trust renaissance because

there's an opportunity there for you. While everyone else is panicking about things not working, you can actually be one of the people that is building trust, real trust, earned trust, and that is where PR comes in. Because this is what PR actually does for you. It builds credibility, it builds that trust. It's not just about visibility. You may have heard me talk about this before. Anyone can take some nice headshots and put them on a social media account.

Visibility doesn't get you known for what you do. This is about building authority that actually means something

about earning trust, not just taking for granted that people are going to believe what you say that you know about. So let me break down the four ways that PR is gonna do that for you. The third party endorsement, that is somebody else saying you're good. Not just you saying you're good, not just you posting on Instagram or sending out an email, it's somebody else saying, hey, check out Pippa at the PR set, she actually knows what she's talking about.

And that can be done in so many different ways, whether it's a journalist writing about you in a newspaper or magazine, podcast interviews, being quoted as an expert, industry awards, speaking gigs. All of these are some sort of third party endorsement. And whilst we're in this trust recession, this matters more than ever because people don't necessarily just trust what you say about yourself. They've heard that from people that don't deliver.

there's an actual psychology behind why third-party endorsement works so well, it's social proof. So if a journalist thinks you're worth featuring, if a podcast host thinks you're worth having a conversation with, if a publication quotes you as an expert, our brains go okay well they must be legit, somebody else has already done the vetting for us and we need that right now because we don't trust our own judgment anymore, we've been burnt too many times, I even did it myself, bear in mind

work in PR. I've been playing this game for 20-something years. I was looking at working with a nutritionist from a personal perspective and I went on her website and I saw all the places that she'd been featured. She had you know the publications that really aligned with me like Red Magazine, Sunday Times Style, Stylist Magazine and it made me think ⁓ she knows what she's talking about because she's been featured in those publications.

If that PR, if that press coverage is working that way with me, it's definitely going to work that way with your clients as well.

The other thing that this third party endorsement does for you is it bypasses the bullshit detector. When you're saying you're amazing, we can be a bit skeptical about that, but what about when someone else is saying it for you? When an outside party with nothing to gain from says this person knows what they're talking about, we lean into that because it's not coming from you.

there's that authority by association. If you're featured in a respected publication on a well-known podcast, if you're speaking at an industry event, you borrow that credibility. And it doesn't even have to be that your target audience is actually reading that magazine article or listening to that well-respected podcast. It's actually just could be that you are then using it within your marketing to remind people about why you're good at what you do. And that has that trust association with it.

So, know, this nutritionist that I looked at her website, I did actually click through to a few of the articles, but the fact that I saw she'd been featured by those publications did a real job for her in terms of me knowing that she would know what she's talking about and actually has the expertise in what I am looking for. So this is what PR does for you. It gets other people talking about you. It's not advertising where you're paying for the placement.

earned media, earned credibility, you can't buy it, you have to earn it

it's not just logo bagging, it's shorthand for a journalist vetted me and thought I was worth featuring. It's a filter. know, journalists don't just feature anybody. They can't. They have a due diligence, a job to do. So when your website says featured in XYZ, when your social profile does, look at the social profiles of big names. They usually will have as featured in, as heard in.

a list of podcasts they've been included in or stages they've spoken on because that gives them that instant credibility boost and that badge of credibility works, like I said, if no one's actually reading the piece.

So this can be applied to speaking opportunities, press coverage, podcast interviews, all sorts of different ways, collaborations, all sorts of different PR routes that you can use to help build trust, credibility, authority within your business without you just saying, look at me, look at me, look at me, through your socials and through your marketing channels.

And the second thing I want to talk about is the importance of building your personal profile, getting known for what you do here within the context of a trust recession is so important because your personal profile, getting known for what you do is what is going to help show that you know what you're talking about, it's going to help build that trust, it's going to show that you are an expert.

that you have a point of view, that you have a personality, that you are a founder that should be listened to. And you've heard me say before, I'm not a massive fan of the term personal brand. I talk about building your personal profile because I think that you can do it in a way that is more authentic to who you are.

And there's a psychology here too. Familiarity breeds trust. The more we see somebody, the more we tend to like and trust them. Or maybe there's a polar opposite, but you know, we can forget about those people. But the more people are seeing you showing up regularly, they're hearing your voice, they're understanding what you think about certain topics, about your areas of expertise, the more they feel like they know you. And we buy from people we know or people we feel we know.

even in a trust recession, especially in a trust recession, we need to feel like we know somebody before we'll take the risk of working with them. And that's something I think we've talked about in the mastermind. We've seen a lot more of people wanting to get to know us for longer, you know, before people would buy very quickly. And there's different ways that people are getting to know us. And that's why things like your podcast could be a really good tool for you. You're obviously email marketing.

But using PR to get in front of people, to build that trust, to show your personality, to deep dive into your areas of expertise is what's really important. Because remember, it's not just visibility. That's the bit that people get wrong. It's not posing for pretty content on Instagram. It's being known for something, your expertise, your approach, your results, your point of view. That credibility piece is really important and photos and generic content.

on Instagram are just not going to cut it. People want substance. They want to see that you actually know what you're talking about and how you think. They're not trusting that surface level stuff anymore. They want to go and deep dive with you. And if you have various points of contact that they can get to know you through that process,

So in PR terms, this looks like podcast appearances where you deep dive on topics. It could be contributions to regular features in the press, speaking at events, being the go-to expert that the media come to when they need a quote on your topic, building that body of work that shows people what you know and how you think over time helps to build that familiarity.

and the familiarity builds trust even when trust is hard to come by, especially when trust is hard to come by. And the other thing I want to touch on, and this is where PR works really well for you, is through word of mouth and recommendations. And that's where somebody who's worked with you tells someone else to work with you. It's also where people who haven't worked with you tell someone else to work with you. And this is something actually personally I find works really well for me.

and that you can do this really well in communities, in memberships, in groups, where you can show your expertise, that you can show that you know what you're talking about, and you will find that you get recommendations from people who haven't actually worked with you. It's such a trusted form of marketing of PR, especially within this trust recession. If somebody else is recommending you to somebody,

then that is a really good start for you. You know, you can feel that shift, that that momentum build when people start recommending you, especially when they haven't worked with you.

And

point that I wanna talk about within the context of this trust recession is the AI factor. There's no getting away from it. It is everywhere. We're actually doing a session in my DIY PR membership very soon on AI and PR because there are lots of ways it can help you, but there's also lots of ways that it can't help you. But from a trust perspective,

it's really affecting how we are viewing people and the content that they're putting out there. We're drowning in generic, could be written by anyone content. You see it on LinkedIn a lot and Instagram as well. And I think this is what's making the trust recession even worse is because we can't really tell what's real anymore.

And as a response to the AI movement, we are also seeing that people are actively seeking out human connection in response. They want to work with real people with real experience. We're craving that authenticity piece, like the real authenticity, not like a pretend Instagram version. And when everything could be AI, being genuinely you is your superpower. So the more that you can get out there and get in front of people in lots of different ways in different places,

is going to give you that competitive advantage. Showing your humanness is what's going to help you at the moment whilst we are in this trust recession. And PR helps here because you can't AI your way to a podcast interview. You can't AI a speaking gig where people meet you face to face and hear what you've got to say. You can't AI your way into the press.

You can't fake the relationships that you build with journalists or that piece of press coverage that you get. It's human to human stuff and that's what we're craving right now and that is only going to build and build as the AI machine takes over.

And so if we bring all of this together, we've established we are in a trust recession. Trust has bottomed out, people have been burned, they're skeptical. They're not just handing over their money willy nilly anymore. They're not just jumping in to work with people. They're doing their due diligence. They're researching. They're spending time getting to know you before they spend.

But that is where there is an opportunity for you. That is the Renaissance part of this because whilst everyone else is struggling because old tactics don't work, you can be building real trust, earning it the proper way, the old school way really. PR isn't just about getting your name out there. It never was, but especially not now. It's about building the credibility and trust that makes people want to actually work with you, that gets them...

down that funnel quicker because they can see that you have been talked about by the right people in the right places.

So this is how you get known for what you do, not just seen, but known, trusted. And yes, it takes time, it takes strategy, a bit of a plan, it takes being good at what you do. We can't just blag this anymore. You can't PR your way out of being a bit shit at what you do.

and you definitely can't fake your way through a trust recession. And my prediction is the people who do this work, who spend the time building their profile, getting known for what they do, connecting with their target audience through multiple touch points are going to be the ones that we see thrive into 2026.

So that is enough from me, I hope this has given you some food for thought, slide into my DMs if you want to chat more about it because I think it is such an interesting topic that we should be discussing more and more.

If you are interested in doing this work then you can join my DIY PR membership, you can use the code POD50 to get 50 % off your first month. You can join my one-to-one accelerator, I have got a couple of spots left before Christmas and I am also taking bookings for January and onwards and just FYI the price is going up in the new year so if you jump in now pre-Christmas, whether we start pre-Christmas or in January, you will lock in the 2025.

price and also breaking news I have just launched a brand new way of working with me which is a VIP get known in a day day where we will deep dive into your PR look at nailing your PR strategy look at building your PR list look at getting you sending the fucking emails there and then we will get your pictures drafted we will get you

the right mindset and I have two spots available before Christmas for that so if you are ready to jump in and get going with your PR then that might be something for you to have a look at. Slide into my DMs you can find me Pippa the PR set on Instagram or Pippa Gordon on LinkedIn and I am theprset.com if you want to find out more on my website and I will see you again soon for another episode of PR Made Simple.