Nobody Expects the Moment of Truth

Some products make their value easy to experience. A car drives a certain way, a supermarket has a layout, atmosphere and people, and an airline gets you from A to B, hopefully together with your luggage and without breaking any guitars. You can use those products, compare them and form an opinion from what actually happens.

Over the last year and a half, I have been thinking much more about the opposite: products whose core value is largely invisible. Electricity, telecommunications, banking and insurance are obvious examples. Calling them commodities does not mean the offers are identical: 150 Mbit is not 1,000 Mbit, latency matters, and €10 million of liability cover is not €100 million. But once the relevant level of performance is there, the provider can become surprisingly interchangeable. Brands have been trying to counter that for decades: electricity became yellow, communication suddenly became magenta, and banks started talking about their apps in advertising.

That last one is interesting because an app gives an otherwise abstract product something people can actually experience. I can judge whether transferring money is easy or whether I can withdraw cash without thinking about which ATM belongs to whom. The invisible product gets a visible, usable surface. And when that surface simply works, it becomes evidence that the organisation behind it probably has its act together.

I learned how difficult the underlying problem can be when I started working in insurance with basically no idea about insurance. My reaction to €10 million of personal liability cover was roughly: what on earth am I going to break — a pair of glasses does not cost ten million. Then I started to understand what liability can actually mean, why those sums exist, and why personal liability insurance is anything but a nice-to-have.

Feature lists did not make that understanding much easier; even now, somewhere between keys, drones and dozens of clauses, they can become pretty overwhelming. And then you come across things like a best-performance guarantee: if another insurer offers better cover for a particular case, your own policy may promise to match it. At that point, the product almost makes its own interchangeability part of the proposition.

Thankfully, I have never had to find out personally why €100 million might matter. Nobody expects the moment when they need accident insurance — and nobody wants to. If it comes, something catastrophic has happened. That is the strange thing about some invisible products: their differences can be enormously important while you may never experience their core value yourself.

So trust has to grow through the evidence around the product. A digital channel that simply works, clear language, a sensible process, somebody who removes a problem instead of creating another one, or a friend telling you how an organisation behaved when things went wrong all count. Those experiences tell me far more than a campaign explaining how trustworthy a brand supposedly is.

And they do not happen at the surface alone. Whether somebody can actually solve my problem depends on responsibilities, processes, information, decision rights and ultimately how the organisation works. For invisible products especially, trust is not something to claim. Make the whole thing work, and let people decide for themselves whether they trust you.