Trust Travels Further Than Products

Most businesses define themselves by what they make. Their strategy asks what else they're capable of building, and which categories sit next to the one they're in. Customers don't think like that. They think about who they trust, and for what. Every business has a boundary around it, drawn in the customer's mind, marking the things they'd accept from you without a second thought. I call it “the trust radius”, and it often reaches much further than a business's product range, though rarely in the direction the business expects.

The trust radius isn't set by capability. It comes from three things:

1. •what customers believe you know
2. •where you sit in their life or work
3. •whose side they think you're on

That's why two moves that look similar on a strategy slide can land completely differently with customers.

For a good part of my career I worked in mobile banking, at a time when high street banks were trying to turn the extraordinary engagement of their apps into new revenue. The obvious answer was offers and loyalty: discounts on lunch and golf clubs, coupons and card-linked offers. Millions were spent on trials across many banks, and it never really caught on. The analogy I used to explain why was selling socks in a branch. If you walked into your bank to talk about your mortgage and someone tried to sell you socks, you wouldn't think it was a bargain. You'd think it was odd, and you might start to wonder what else they were up to. Engagement was never the problem. Customers opened their banking app several times a week because they trusted the bank with their money, and that trust simply didn't extend to lunch.

Working with one of Germany's best-known banks to launch card payments for merchants was a very different experience. In the aftermath of the Wirecard scandal, merchants were anxious about safety, security and reliability, which were exactly the things they already trusted their bank to get right. Moving into payments wasn't a stretch for the bank. It was a natural extension of what customers already believed it was for, and the timing made that permission unusually strong. The same bank that couldn't have sold coupons could credibly offer to look after merchants' takings.

Put side by side, those two experiences explain most of what I know about the trust radius. Both were banks using an existing relationship to grow into something new, and both had the capability to deliver. One went with the grain of what customers trusted it for, and one went against it.

Most businesses misjudge their radius in both directions. They underestimate it because permission is rarely stated, and research tends to ask about the product in front of the customer rather than the relationship around it. They overestimate it because capability feels like permission from the inside. Having the skills and the systems to do something makes it feel natural, even when customers would find it strange. The edges matter too. Some moves do more than fail. They damage the trust the core business depends on by changing whose side customers think you're on.

Customers signal your radius all the time. Look at what they already ask you for that you don't offer, which frontline teams hear every week, usually as a question beginning "do you also". Then test ideas with a simple no-surprise test. If you launched this tomorrow, would your best customers find it natural, surprising or wrong? Natural is inside the radius. Wrong is outside, however capable you are.