Building Trust in Business

This chapter explores the evolution of consumer trust, from initial annoyance with advertisements to deep reliance on service providers. It critiques traditional business practices that prioritize short-term gains over ethical decision-making and emphasizes the need for businesses to cultivate lasting customer relationships through consistent value delivery.

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Episode notes

This episode of The Eric Ries Show is all about the relationship between trust and success. I can’t think of anyone better to talk about it with than Seth Godin, author of the classic Permission Marketing, the best-seller This Is Marketing, and many other books, as well as a fantastic daily blog that has been going strong since the early days.

He also co-founded two companies, Squidoo and Yoyodyne. While the world tends to view Seth as an expert on marketing, he sees what he does in slightly different terms. “What I write about is how do humans interact? What stories do we tell ourselves? What do we want? What's worth doing?”

We talked about the roots of “the epidemic of unicorns,” the two approaches to gaining customer loyalty, how AI has permanently changed the means of production, how to build systems that create the conditions for great work to occur more easily, plus:

• False proxies

• The permissions hierarchy

• The power of stories

• The problem with business school

• Continuous effort

• Why Amazon lost customer trust

• Seth’s definition of marketing

• Chocolate cookies

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