July 2020: Fostering Trust in Your Brand and Beyond, with Margot Bloomstein

In this session Margot Bloomstein, Principal of Appropriate, Inc., explains how designers can build trust.

In today’s economy, organizations need a new strategy to earn trust, act with transparency, and help consumers and citizens make confident decisions. But undermining confidence is cynicism: it erodes trust in the media, government, public institutions, and consumer brands. To regain the trust of consumers and citizens, marketers talk about empathy and authenticity. But how do you get beyond those buzzwords? Give more control to your audience—and they’ll put more trust in you.

We must empower our audiences to earn their trust. Our tactical choices in content and design can engage, educate, and ultimately empower people. Drawing on examples from retail, publishing, government, and other industries, learn how voice, volume, and vulnerability can inform your design and content strategy to earn the trust of your users. Let’s address the tough questions: How do brands develop rapport when audiences let emotion cloud logic? Is there a place for vulnerability in corporate strategy? And what’s the role of command and control consistency in the creative work of a corporate enterprise? These questions can drive design choices in organizations of any size and industry—and the way we respond can empower users and rebuild our ability to trust in society itself.

Margot Bloomstein consults, writes, and speaks about content strategy and how brands build trust through content—especially right now, as we all embrace a new normal for trust, transparency, and empowered communication. The principal of Appropriate, Inc., she’s the author of the seminal Content Strategy at Work and Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap, coming in March 2021 from Page Two Books. For 20 years, she has helped shape the content strategy industry by leading workshops, keynoting conferences, and consulting for communications, marketing, and UX teams in a range of institutions. Margot’s work in message architecture-driven content strategy informs the communication of the American Montessori Society, messaging at Sallie Mae, crisis response at Harvard University, and cultural tourism in the state of Nevada. Her clients also include Fidelity, Lovehoney, Scholastic, and Lindt and Sprüngli. A participant in the inaugural Content Strategy Consortium and featured speaker at SXSW, Margot is a popular keynote speaker at corporate events, conferences, and in private workshops around the world. She also produces BrandSort and teaches in the graduate program of FH Joanneum University in Graz, Austria. She advises Women Talk Design, a network of underrepresented speakers in design and adjacent industries, and actively participates in discussion around content, design, and trust on Twitter at @mbloomstein.

Note that this will be a live streaming event. For what I hope are obvious reasons we won’t be sitting together in a physical space!

Please register for this free event

Thursday July 23, 2020
5:30pm to 7:00pm ET
Live streamed to wherever you are!