Microsoft, the technology company, believes that trust is a vital brand attribute that must be embedded throughout its entire organisation, rather than solely being a message promoted in a campaign.

“We are in the business of trust,” Tuula Rytilä, corporate vice president for Microsoft Digital Stores, told delegates at the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) in Las Vegas.

Elaborating on this theme, Rytilä explained that building trust is not simply a matter of communications, but a value that needs to be embraced across an entire company.

“We’re trying to make it concrete [and define] what trust really means in our products and in our culture,” she said. (For more, read WARC’s in-depth report: How trust, inclusivity and authenticity drive the customer experience at Microsoft.)

“It’s not like a marketing campaign that you run … It actually is something that has to be in your culture. You have to make it concrete in your products. And then you get to talk about it to your customers.”

One mantra for Microsoft in this regard is “Do more and talk less” – an idea shown in its digital stores, a business unit that Rytilä leads.

As the proprietor of “the company front door – whether you walk into a physical Microsoft Store or come to Microsoft.com and the homepage that my team runs – one of our core ambitions is to create trust with customers,” she said.

“Our mission is to help empower individuals and organisations to achieve more and really help them in cloud transformation.”

In this context, she added, “Trust is foundational. You want to be able to trust Microsoft to put your data and your private information in our cloud.”

Even as the nature and number of Microsoft products and services has continued to evolve, Rytilä stated, “There cannot be any risks with security and privacy.”

By way of an example of how the company builds trust in this area, she pointed to how Microsoft decided to apply the tight privacy provisions of the European Union’s General Data Privacy Regulation.

“We not only did it in Europe, but we did it locally [in every market] because we want to be a leader.”

Sourced from WARC