Great news: You’ve successfully caught the attention of a potential customer or client! As they’re deciding whether to make a purchase, that customer will evaluate your brand and compare their options. And it’s brand credibility—the impression of trustworthiness and transparency your brand exudes—that reassures this customer that they’re making the right choice.
For many customers, credibility is a baseline requirement. Research shows that 75% of consumers consider transparency to be important, and two out of three people are willing to switch brands because of how transparently the brands do business. And this positive brand perception isn’t a given. A 2024 PwC report found that while 90% of executives believe customers have high trust in their businesses, only 30% of customers actually do.
Building your brand’s credibility facilitates a stronger emotional connection with consumers, which can help you build a loyal base of return customers and long-term staying power for your business. Keep reading to learn why credibility matters and how to establish and strategically leverage it.
Brand credibility refers to customers’ overall perception of the expertise, honesty, and consistency of your brand. If your customer base believes that your business knows what it’s doing, isn’t hiding anything from its customers, and offers products or services that actually work, they’re likely to have a high degree of brand trust and a positive brand perception—key to having strong brand credibility.
With consumer skepticism on the rise, building credibility and trust is more important than ever. And customers expect you to put in the work. In the same PwC report, 92% of surveyed consumers said they believe that organizations have a responsibility to build trust. And 87% of those surveyed in Salsify’s 2025 Consumer Research report said that having trust in a brand makes them willing to spend more.
Credibility is crucial to the health of your business. By building brand credibility, you can:
Harness brand trust. Brand credibility helps assure customers that your business will deliver on its brand promise—the positive impact that you purport to offer your customers.
Foster brand loyalty. Building brand credibility increases brand affinity—customers’ emotional connection to your brand and perceived alignment with your core values—and motivates them to consistently choose your brand over competitors, improving your customer retention.
Build brand awareness. Satisfied, loyal customers often share their positive experiences with others, whether organically through word-of-mouth marketing, or through formalized systems like referral programs—a process known as brand advocacy.
Set yourself up for long-term success. Taking intentional steps to cement and convey your brand credibility can support your broader business objectives around revenue and customer satisfaction by boosting your brand equity—the overall value and market strength of your brand.
Let’s look at some common roadblocks that crop up when businesses are building brand credibility and fostering trust—and some strategies for overcoming them.
To establish credibility, you need evidence, which you must build over time. If your company is new, start early by amplifying the sentiments of your small but growing customer base from the beginning. Solicit video testimonials, for example, or incentivize user-generated content creation so you can share social proof that yours is a credible brand.
Max Kislevitz, cofounder of fitness brand Bala, explains that leveraging your brand community is one of the easiest and most effective ways to help you stand out. “The best defense—it’s such a cliche—is a good offense,” he says on the Shopify Masters podcast. “I think our best players on that proverbial team are our customers and Bala enthusiasts that are advocating on our behalf.”
For customers to trust a business, they need to know the products or services they offer are safe and do what they claim. This can be tricky when founders themselves aren’t experts in technical fields—food scientists, dermatologists, engineers, etc. Highlighting in-house experts or third-party stamps of approval can help.
Tower 28 Beauty founder Amy Liu is transparent about her professional background. “The truth is, I’m not a dermatologist, I’m not a toxicologist,” she explains on Shopify Masters. “You shouldn’t believe me if I just say: ‘This is safe for sensitive skin.’”
Instead, Tower 28 has a medical advisory board and secures outside verification for its claims.
“I’m not spending all day thinking about what the next ingredient is that’s going to be an endocrine disruptor,” Amy adds. “That’s just not my skill set. But somebody else is, so I lean into those people.”
Razvan Romanescu, founder of beauty incubator Underlining, echoes on Shopify Masters the value of stepping back and letting experts do the talking. He doesn’t have a background in beauty, and the brands are mostly marketed to and used by women.
“I don’t act as the face of Underlining just because, to some, the messaging may be confusing,” he says. Instead, Underlining engages a lot of thought leaders in the space, whether that’s beauty influencers or aestheticians and trichologists (hair and scalp specialists), to demonstrate the approval of those who matter.
Having other brands copy your products, ideas, or marketing style can negatively impact your credibility. Similarly, being in a crowded field with many low-quality brands can mean you’re sometimes painted with the same brush as others. Consistent performance and exceeding expectations can help restore that trust in the long run, but you may also need other tactics to set your brand apart from others.
Men’s jewelry brand CRAFTD London used out-of-home advertising to build that credibility.
“One of the big issues that we have in our industry is that we have a lot of copycats that copy CraftD. And there are a lot of brands that don’t fulfill their orders,” Danny Buck, cofounder of CRAFTD, says on an episode of Shopify Masters. “They’ll do advertising, they’ll look legit, but then the order won’t come in, or it won’t be what’s been advertised. And we unfortunately get brought into that because there are a lot more men’s jewelry brands than there used to be. So we needed ways of making us look legitimate.”
The brand’s use of ads on buses and tubes helped build legitimacy and set it apart from its social-first competitors.
Here are actionable ways to position yours as a credible brand—and follow through on it.
Certification programs from outside organizations can offer consumers confirmation of positive business practices, such as sustainable business operations, proof of benefits and safety, organic ingredients, and more. Opting in (and paying for the review process and badge, if applicable) can therefore be a worthwhile step in developing a trustworthy brand image.
Tower 28 products, for example, undergo a multistep evaluation to get the “seal of acceptance” from the National Eczema Association (NEA), which appears on every bottle.
“Beauty is incredibly, incredibly crowded right now,” Amy says. “The testing part of it has to be the brand promise.”
The NEA affirms that the brand’s products are free of irritating ingredients and has its own dermal toxicologist review the results of consumer testing. For some shoppers, this added stamp of approval may be just what they need to feel confident in their purchase.
Collaborating strategically with a complementary brand—one that’s a thought leader in a parallel space or has clear synergy with your brand’s values—can further bolster your brand credibility by association and get your product or service in front of new audiences.
“I would say that partnerships are an important piece of our marketing puzzle,” Max says about Bala’s outreach. “We try to do so with influencers, with trainers, with tastemakers,” but above all, with gyms and studios, which he sees as “the most authentic place to discover Bala product.”
With its fitness partners (which include industry leaders such as Equinox and CorePower Yoga), the aim is not only to get Bala into retail stores, but also to program the equipment into the classes themselves. It’s a win-win, Max says—and showcases the product while helping their partners “differentiate themselves from classes that might be going on at the studio or gym down the street.”
Once your brand is established and reaching scale, editorial coverage from trusted media sources can reach new customers and convert skeptical ones. Razvan says that PR representation is usually not worth the expense for brands that are just starting out, but that at a certain level, “a ‘featured in’ might give the customer a bit more confidence in buying your product.” This can make a media and communications strategy a worthwhile investment.
Set exploratory meetings with PR firms or independent publicists in your space, then bring on the best fit to help you reach media and tastemakers. You can also consider creating an in-house role or department. Media relations professionals can, among other things, help you craft and distribute press releases and send tailored pitches to their network of journalists. They get your products to editors and influencers for coverage consideration, and help book your company’s spokespeople as expert sources on television and podcasts.
“When you’re actually reaching a level of scale where customers are Googling you to try to compare you against other competitors, or a retailer might be deciding between [you and another brand] … this is where press starts paying dividends,” Razvan says. It’s free publicity, of course, but purely editorial endorsements (aka “earned media”) tend to carry more weight than paid partnerships. “You just become bigger than life,” he says.
Customers appreciate and trust brands that prioritize transparency and open communication, perceiving them as more authentic. “I think when we’re vulnerable, we’re relatable,” Mimi Ikonn, cofounder of Luxy Hair, says on Shopify Masters. “Being vulnerable makes you more authentic, and when you’re more authentic, people trust you.”
Content marketing is a valuable tool for showing your brand’s more human side. Mimi finds that while short-form, social-first video can be important, long-form content is a way to amplify her brand’s authenticity. “I’m a huge believer in long content because it is findable in search engines and also because you can go deeper,” she says.
As a founder, try getting in front of the camera or starting your own newsletter or blog to try to foster an emotional connection with your brand. On your social channels, offer behind-the-scenes glimpses that illuminate supply chains or demonstrate your employees’ passion for their work.
“When you genuinely enjoy what you’re creating, people love watching those videos,” Mimi says. “And then they engage, and they come back.”
Credibility means customers believe they’ll get what they paid for. A company that takes pride in offering high-quality products or services and exceeding customer expectations will always compare favorably to one that cuts corners.
Establish standard operating procedures that include formalized processes for quality control; create a schedule of regular audits for your own operations and your suppliers; invest in product development and improvement; and solicit customer feedback regularly, then take steps to incorporate it.
Max from Bala attributes his company’s success partly to its rigorous product design and development. “Each of our products has to be the world’s best before we’re prepared to launch them,” he explains. “That is not the standard of a lot of the knockoffs.”
Make brand credibility part of your long-term strategy by keeping tabs on your progress to determine what’s working, and adapt nimbly when things change. You can check on consumer sentiment through direct research tactics like surveys or social media listening. You can also gain valuable insights from other important metrics related to credibility, such as referral traffic, customer churn, customer satisfaction scores (CSAT), and your overall Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Gyve Safavi and Mark Rushmore, cofounders of the toothbrush brand SURI, note that tracking and maintaining a 4.8 rating with nearly 7,000 reviews on Trustpilot serves as the “bedrock” of the brand’s growth. Suri relies heavily on this visible metric of customer love to build trust with new shoppers.
“We didn’t realize that people really love the product,” Gyve says on Shopify Masters. “We thought we were there. We’re like, this is good enough. This is better than average, but we started to see the reviews come in, and what we started hearing people say is like, ‘I never enjoyed brushing my teeth, and now I do.’”
The brand used those reviews to publicize its product and also as a way to make it better and add details based on solving their pain points.
In a marketing context, a credible brand is one that customers have confidence in, perceiving it as reliable, authentic, high-performing, and worthy of their trust.
Examples of factors that help establish brand credibility include honest communication, consistent product quality, policies geared toward a good customer experience, and business practices that align with a brand’s core values.
No one metric completely captures brand credibility. Instead, you can measure it with quantitative data like customer satisfaction scores, Net Promoter Score, repeat purchase rates, and referral traffic—and by using qualitative consumer research and brand listening.
