Black Friday 2011 was the biggest shopping day of the year in America. Patagonia placed a full-page advertisement in The New York Times featuring their bestselling fleece jacket. Five words were printed above the photo: “Don’t Buy This Jacket.” Below the photo, they explained why.
Producing one of those jackets consumed 135 liters of water (“Enough to supply one person’s basic needs for 45 days”), and produced 20 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions (“24 times more than the jacket’s own weight”), Patagonia later wrote of their own campaign.
Essentially, they were instructing customers not to buy things from them. On the one day of the year specifically devoted to consumption.
It should’ve tanked sales. Instead, Patagonia experienced roughly a 30% increase in sales over the next year, according to multiple retellings of the story. Patagonia didn’t tell people they could trust them; they showed people by doing something honestly counterproductive to their own short-term success where the whole world could see. Here’s how to do it.
Trust is never said. It’s simply demonstrated. And when building trust with someone who doesn’t know and understand you yet, the only way to demonstrate it to them is to do something that goes against your immediate interest in a way they can verify. Telling people to trust you helps nobody. Including you.
“I trust you” is a sentence that has convinced nobody of anything since language was invented.
This is way more important for you than it is for Patagonia. You’re not Patagonia. You don’t have 40 years of reputable outdoor clothing fording America’s greatest rivers stamped across your business card. You’re a student contacting someone: a founder who can give you insights and advice, perhaps a customer who could buy your stuff, or an audience who may follow you on social media. They’ve never heard of you. They have zero reason to believe you’re competent. In fact, they have every reason to assume you’re doing a stupid thing if you cold-message them out of the blue.
Right now your trust-account with the world is at exactly zero. And a lot of what people try to do first (“I scored a 158 on greatcheater.com!” “Send you the highest quality service!”) doesn’t change that number.
Only these things do:
Say what you did, not what you want.You email someone and say “I read your last three product updates and noticed you didn’t mention your onboarding flow. If you’re looking for someone to review that process, I can…” That’s not bragging; that’s a specific observation that the recipient can go and easily check you were right. Saying “I’m detail-oriented” or “I care about helping startups” is easy to say and it’s worthless. Be specific.
Give first. The reason I connected Episode 23’s newsletter strategy with Patagonia’s ad campaign is that it works for the same reason. Morning Brew built up months of value for their readers before asking them for anything at all in return. Want someone to trust you? Give first. A quick research report. A real answer to a question they had. A genuinely useful edit on their document.
Zero expectation required. When it’s free, people notice.
Find somebody who will say it for you. Researchers at Nielsen polled more than 28,000 people across 56 countries in 2012, and the results were uniform: 92% of people trusted referrals from people they knew more than any other form of advertising, including brands saying nice things about themselves. What’s true for Procter & Gamble is true for you too. Find one really specific, helpful sentence that you can ask someone else to say. A teacher. A past client you worked for. A former classmate that you helped. Ask if you can quote them. Most will say yes.
Only make promises you can keep. And keep them. “I’ll send you lots of good stuff soon” is worthless. “I’ll send you these 3 resources by Thursday at 5 pm” is something they can hang your words against. When you keep small, specific promises, people start wondering if you’re actually trustworthy. Big fuzzy promises just pile onto the noise.
Tell them the part they don’t want to hear is still true. Patagonia’s ad worked because it was costly for them to say that. They could have printed “BUY MORE JACKET!” in that spot. And sold more jackets. But they trusted their customers enough to show them where they were wasteful. You’ll build far more trust telling your reader that you know your product pitch still sucks than you will pumping it full of fluffy words. “The thing is, our shipping is still really expensive” is worth a million Ionic perpendicular headlines because people know every inbound marketer in the world is lying through their teeth about shipping times. Tell people what you know is still wrong, and they’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you’re honest.
Trust isn’t something you claim. It’s just something people decide you have after they notice a pattern. One small, verifiable promise at a time.
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