‘The train has left the station on transparency’

Trust and transparency dominated this morning’s keynote debate at Shock of the New, the MRS Annual Conference 2013.

“There is a lot of shock going on at the moment,” said debate chairman and BBC Today presenter Justin Webb. This “shock” he said, has to do with information – the amount of it – and how people are dealing with it in their daily lives.

With the rise in available information sources there has been a corresponding fall in the amount of trust in authority figures and brands. But according to Patrick Barwise, emeritus professor of management and marketing at London Business School, the decline in trust is not universal.

Some brands and institutions – among them, retailers – have remained very highly trusted, as are academics and doctors. “It’s not the case that no-one is trusted,” said Barwise, “but it is the case that marketers want more of it.”

As in marriage, Barwise said, the only way to build trust in business is to keep your promises. When you don’t, of course, social media allows your failings to be quickly shared with the rest of the world.

“What institutions need to realise is that they have to start operating as if they are in a glass box,” said Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts. “They still believe that the problem is to find cleverer ways to hide the fact that their private interests don’t relate to the public interest.”

Organisations feel self-pity, Taylor said. They feel the public doesn’t understand them and that’s why they can’t be honest about their intentions; that they have to manipulate their image. They say they’d like to do the right thing but it would impact their profitability and so shareholders would punish senior managers.

“But organisations have to start wearing their dilemmas on their sleeves,” said Taylor. “If the conversation you are having [internally] is not a conversation the public would approve of, you will be in trouble.”

Camilla Harrison, chief operating officer of ad agency MCSaatchi agreed with Taylor. She said: “The train has left the station on transparency. If brands aren’t transparent they will be treated with suspicion.” And if you’re going to be transparent, you have to be simple, said Harrison. “If you confuse people, that’s another version of being opaque.”