By Gisela Crescipulli - Creative Brand Strategist at Paisanos

A brand can say many things about itself. It can talk about closeness, simplicity, support, innovation, trust, and loyalty. The familiar art of self-promotion.

It can build an impeccable identity, find the right tone of voice, and develop a campaign capable of embedding all those ideas in the minds of the people who see it.

But then, when the time comes for those people to actually use the product, the conversation around the brand can become incredibly positive or completely negative. Words only go so far. A promise may begin with a campaign, but it needs to be confirmed through experience.

Brand trust is not built solely through what a company says or shows. It is also built interaction by interaction, through what people actually experience.

The essentials in 4 points

• Brand trust is not built only through what a company says, but through what people experience in every interaction.
• According to Edelman (2025), trust is shaped by three sources: what the brand says, what others say, and people’s own experience. Only one of those is controlled by brand messaging.
• A single bad experience can be enough to lose a customer who loves the brand. In Argentina, 77% say experience plays a role when choosing between options (PwC).
• Consistency does not mean repeating the same message. It means making sure every touchpoint contributes to the same overall perception (McKinsey).

What Is Brand Trust?

Brand trust is the expectation that a company will behave consistently with what it promises.

For that very reason, it does not depend exclusively on communication. The purchase experience, the product itself, customer service, response times, interface copy, and every other touchpoint throughout the relationship also play a role.

The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer — the annual global survey that measures people’s trust and credibility in four key institutions: business, government, media, and non-governmental organizations — highlights in its report Brand Trust: From We to Me that trust in a brand is shaped by three different sources:

• what the brand says about itself
• what other people say
• each person’s own experience

So, what a company communicates is only one of the three pillars. The other two exist outside the direct control of brand messaging.

In a digital product, even a seemingly small decision can strengthen or weaken that perception.

A brand can say that everything is simple while building an unnecessarily complex process. It can promise support and leave the user alone at the moment of greatest uncertainty. Or, even more seriously, it can talk about transparency while the product hides important information.

When that happens, the problem is no longer just about UX. The gap between what the brand promises and what the person experiences creates distance, and that distance affects trust.

Does the Product Experience Communicate Too?

Yes. Every interaction with the product — response times, interface messages, statuses, customer support — either confirms or contradicts what the brand promised. Experience is a form of communication, not something separate from it.

For a long time, historically even, these conversations tended to be treated separately.

• On one side, the brand: strategy, narrative, identity, communication.
• On the other, the product: features, interfaces, journeys, metrics.

But for the person on the other side, that division does not exist because they experience everything as a whole. Users do not think, “This part belongs to branding and this part belongs to the product team!” They simply experience the company.

The product is one of the places where a brand proves how true its promise really was. And when that fails, as we mentioned earlier, the cost can be significant.

According to PwC’s 2018 study Experience is Everything, 1 in 3 people will stop doing business with a brand they love after just one bad experience. In Latin America, that number rises: almost half of consumers, 49%, say the same. And in Argentina, 77% say experience matters when choosing between purchasing options.

So we can safely say — and back it up with data — that yes, experience communicates too.

Coderhouse: When Changing the Brand Also Meant Changing the Experience

Let me explain this through an example we worked on at Paisanos. The Coderhouse project began with a request to change its logo.

The problem we identified was that we could not simply change the logo when, behind it, Coderhouse itself was evolving and changing its value proposition. It needed to move beyond the perception of being an online course platform and prepare for a new stage of international expansion.

That was when we asked ourselves: if Coderhouse no longer wanted to be perceived as a catalog of courses, what should using Coderhouse actually feel like?

That exploration led to the concept of “Horizonte” — “Horizon” — a brand territory built around the idea of continuous progress.

This new identity aligned design, narrative, tone of voice, product, and communication around that concept, bringing product and brand together to deliver on the same promise.

We helped the platform begin moving away from a catalog-based logic toward a career-map logic, making milestones, progress, and deliverables visible. Artificial intelligence — which was already present through tools such as its 24/7 tutor — took on a supporting role rather than becoming the center of the narrative. And community stopped functioning solely as a brand claim and began taking on a more structural role within the value proposition.

Looking back, each of those decisions helped answer the same question: what would a person need to experience in order to believe that Coderhouse truly supports their professional development?

Does Brand Consistency Mean Repeating the Same Message Everywhere?

No. Consistency does not mean repeating the same message, design, or function across every touchpoint. It means making sure they all contribute to building the same overall perception.

When teams begin putting this into practice, it can be confusing — and even difficult — to understand that repeating the same pattern is not necessary in order to communicate the same idea clearly.

According to McKinsey’s research on customer satisfaction, aptly titled Consistency, Consistency, Consistency, performance across the entire customer journey predicts satisfaction and loyalty much more accurately than performance at individual interactions. The journey was found to be 35% more predictive of customer satisfaction and 32% more predictive of churn than individual touchpoints.

Put simply: it is not enough for each isolated moment to work. What builds or erodes trust is the consistency of all those moments combined.

To make it even clearer:

If a brand wants to be perceived as simple, that simplicity will probably need to show up in its processes.

If it wants to convey security, the information, confirmations, and product statuses should help reduce uncertainty.

If it promises support, for example, it should ask itself at which moments a person might feel lost and what the experience could do to support them.

Where Do You Start: With the Brand or With the Context?

With the context. Before deciding what a brand should look like, you need to understand the business, its audiences, their expectations, and their friction points. Only then can identity and product begin moving in the same direction.

When we worked with Coderhouse, the challenge quickly stopped being “What should the new brand look like?”

First, we needed to understand the business, its audiences, their expectations, their friction points, and where the company needed to evolve. That analysis allowed us to identify that the real value was not simply in an individual class, but in the professional journey itself and in the way Coderhouse could support people throughout it.

Changing the question made it possible for identity and product to move in the same direction. Ultimately, understanding what people need is the first step toward building and designing every interaction to live up to the trust users deserve.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Product Experience Affect Brand Trust?

Yes. Trust is built interaction by interaction: the product is one of the places where a brand proves whether its promise was actually true.

What Is Brand Consistency?

It means ensuring that every touchpoint contributes to the same overall perception, even when the message, design, or function differs.

Are Branding and Product the Same Thing?

Within a company, they are usually handled by separate teams. But for the user, that division does not exist: they experience one relationship with the brand.

How Do You Design an Experience That Reinforces Trust?

By first understanding what people need and the moments when they may feel lost, so that every interaction can live up to what the brand promises.