We tend to talk a lot about the power of communication to build brands and, of course, as a PR person, I believe in it, but I also think the way people form an opinion about brands has changed quite a lot. People have access to more information than ever and what we say about ourselves is now just one small part of what they can learn about us: they can read reviews, compare products, see what other people are saying and very quickly figure out whether the story a brand is telling actually matches the reality.
For me, that makes communication more important, but also more demanding, because having a great story is no longer enough; we need to think about what we say and how we say it, but also whether anyone on the other side actually cares about what we’re telling them. And this is where I think building trust really starts: with people, rather than with what the company wants to say.
Sometimes we make this much more complicated than it needs to be, when it can be as simple as thinking about yourself or the people around you: would I use this product? Would my friends? What would we actually care about, what problem would we want it to solve and, perhaps most importantly, how would we naturally talk about it? Starting with those questions helps you move away from the internal language we all inevitably pick up at work and towards stories that people can actually relate to, because when someone recognises a problem, a feeling or an experience as their own, you start creating empathy and, with time and consistency, that empathy can turn into trust.
This becomes even more important when you work in tech, where one of the easiest traps to fall into is assuming that everyone understands the things you talk about every day. We get used to our own terminology surprisingly quickly and, before we know it, we’re explaining products using words that make perfect sense inside the company but mean very little to anyone outside it.
At Holafly, for example, we could talk about networks and all the technology behind making an eSIM work across the world, but someone landing alone in a new country isn’t thinking about any of that; they just want their phone to work so they can open Maps, message their family, order a ride or find their hotel without having to think about connectivity at all (we call that peace of mind).
And this is actually where one of the mantras I repeat to my team all the time comes from: make it so simple that your granny could understand it. I genuinely use this as a test because, if someone completely outside our industry can’t understand what we’re trying to say, then we probably haven’t simplified it enough yet; few things are more frustrating than trying to understand something and feeling like it wasn’t written for you in the first place, and it’s very difficult to trust a brand when you don’t really understand what it’s telling you.
Making something easy to understand is one thing, but making people care about it is another, and this is where I think we sometimes get too close to our own companies: we get excited about a new product, feature or announcement because we know how much work has gone into it, but the person on the other side doesn’t have that context and probably doesn’t need it. What they want to know is much simpler: what problem does this actually solve for me?
That’s why, when we’re looking for a story, we try to start with the problem rather than with what we want to announce. Once you understand the problem, it becomes much easier to find the story people will actually relate to, because you’re talking about something that matters to them rather than something that matters to you.
Once you’ve found that story, however, you still need to give people a reason to believe it, and this is probably the second thing I repeat most often to my team: what do we have to support this? Sometimes you don’t even realise how much you needed something, or how big a problem actually was, until you see the data that proves it. In PR, data (and the UX department) are our best friends, because they help us turn something we think or feel into something we can actually demonstrate.
Still, proof doesn’t always have to mean a huge research project (even though we love those); it can also be a customer review, something we’re seeing repeatedly in customer behaviour, product data or even a real experience. For me, this is also what keeps communication connected to reality, because it forces us to separate what we would like people to think about our brand from what we can actually demonstrate.
Supporting your story with proof also means being transparent, although I don’t think transparency means communicating absolutely everything. Part of our job is deciding what people actually need to know (too much information can create just as much confusion as too little), so it’s really about understanding what is relevant to the story and to the person receiving it.
For me, it comes down to setting the right expectations: if there are conditions or limitations that can materially affect someone’s experience, being clear about them doesn’t necessarily weaken the story; sometimes it makes everything else you’re saying more credible. Trust doesn’t require telling people everything, but it does require making sure the story you tell doesn’t promise a reality people won’t find later.
And here comes one of the reasons why I love PR: once you stop looking only at what you want to say about your product, you start noticing how much you can contribute to a bigger conversation. The trick is spotting where what you know connects with something people are already talking about and finding what you can add to that conversation.
This brings me to another one of my mantras, and one that can sometimes be difficult to explain inside companies: the goal isn’t always to make the brand the protagonist. In fact, some of the strongest stories are the ones where it isn’t. Sometimes the best way to build authority is to bring something genuinely useful to a conversation and let the brand earn its place in it.
And then there’s the part that perhaps sounds the least exciting but matters the most: doing all of this consistently. Trust isn’t built because one story performs incredibly well, one press release gets everyone talking or one article lands in every publication you wanted; it builds over time, when people keep seeing that what you say, what you do and what they experience from the brand actually fit together.
And I think this takes us back to where I started: we can find the problem, make complicated things simple, tell the story, support it with proof and be transparent about what sits behind it, but communication becomes truly powerful when it isn’t trying to create a perception from scratch; it’s helping people understand, relate to and eventually trust something that is already real.
