Most Trusted Brand

Anyone based outside the UK may not be aware of the scandal on everyone’s lips here for the past couple of weeks.  It’s widely acknowledged to be the biggest single miscarriage of justice in British history, perpetrated by an organisation and its supplier with ferocious cruelty against hundreds of innocent victims.   Over decades, the organisation blamed and held financially responsible hundreds of its franchisees for accounting discrepancies.  Many lost their homes and all their savings to make the books balance and avoid jail.  Many were sent to jail.   Scores suffered mental breakdowns.  At least four committed suicide.  The organisation and its IT supplier did this in the knowledge that the accounting software was buggy.   And it’s also suggested that the IT supplier may have been remote-accessing employee terminals to fiddle the figures in order to make the organisation’s books balance.

 The organisation in question is called the Post Office and it’s generally agreed to be Britain’s most trusted brand.

What has it got right to achieve this status?  Is it the power of its advertising?  Its distinctiveness from category competitors? The consistency of its visual assets?  The superiority of its product?   Why the deep trust?

Maybe it’s because the Post Office efficiently provides an interface between the individual and the state: it’s where you go to get your identity verified, renew your driving license, collect your pension etc.  It might be about longevity -  it’s the retail outlet of a postal service that been around since the 16th Century after all.   It may simply be down to sheer ubiquity; there are Post Office branches from Lands End to the most Northerly of the Scottish isles, and everywhere inbetween.

All of these are probably true.  But most significant, perhaps, is the nature of the relationships sub-postmasters have with their communities, a facet brilliantly brought alive in ITV’s drama Mr Bates vs. the Post Office.  (It’s ironic that this brand trust, forged by the human energy of sub-postmasters up and down the country, was the very reason no-one initially believed the accused.) 

This scandal offers salutary lessons for all retail and service brands; about how they can have a binding role in communities, through their presence and behaviours; about how trust is born out of the quality of human relationships; about how technology can only ever be an enabler of human trust, not the reason for it.