Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do. ~ Benjamin Spock

Recently I went shopping at my local coop grocer. I had my four-year-old on one hand and a matching I-am-in-this-store right-now bag on the other. Matching as in, name of store matches name on canvas bag, aren’t I nifty? Don’t I belong here?

Well, we buy our lunch, we do some shopping, I let my son pick out a drink.

Gator(you know)ade. That? In here? Come on, kid look at all these natural choices. Don’t any of those look good?

Of course this is the one a child picks.

No?

OK, get whichever one you want. Purple? Yea, ok, go ahead.

Usually with a purchase like this I read the label because I try not to let my family eat/drink/slurp/consume Red Dye 40. Poison.

Because we were in the coop grocer, organic extraordinaire, super grainy, local when possible, I didn’t even check. I trusted them. Implicitly.

When I sat down outside and went to open the bottle I checked anyway and sure enough, RED DYE 40, poison!

Gasp.

When you think about your brand and the trust you want to build with your customer base, consider this:

Building trust takes time. Honoring trust takes integrity. Losing trust only takes a moment.

Did the local coop grocer violate my trust by placing POISON in their refrigerator for me to stumble across? Maybe.

Did they lose me forever as a customer? Absolutely not.

I trust them to be consistent, not perfect. And I should check my own labels no matter what.

Build a brand. Honor what you’re all about. And when you make a mistake,

a. have enough trust built up that your customers can handle mistakes from time to time
b. make it right as soon as you can

I took the drink back into the store and of course they let us trade out for a new one.

We picked green instead.