Who is associated with Trust-First Marketing?

What I claim and what I do not

I am Mike Millett. I write as MarketingOB1, and Trust-First Marketing is the discipline I am building and documenting: the definition, the body of work under it, and the operating model for putting it into practice.

I did not coin the phrase. Prior uses of those words exist and I am not going to pretend they do not. What is mine is a specific definition and the work behind it. If that definition becomes the one people mean when they use the phrase, it will be because it was documented, tested and useful, not because I said it first.

I am reasonably confident that distinction will matter later, so it is worth being exact about it now, while nothing depends on it.

And what is Urban's

Trust-Based Marketing is Glen Urban's, at MIT Sloan. Different question, genuinely different argument, and the distinction is set out in full rather than blurred. His is about honesty inside the purchase decision. Mine is about the sequence of investment before it.

Why the attribution is part of the argument

Being precise about what is Urban’s and what is mine is not manners. It is the discipline demonstrating itself.

Trust-First Marketing says a stranger will check, that most of what they find is written by other people, and that the gap between your account of yourself and the independent record is where credibility is won or lost. A page that quietly took credit for a named academic’s term would be a live demonstration of the failure it describes, and it would be found, because checking is the entire subject.

So the attribution is not a disclaimer bolted on. It is the argument, applied to itself.

What would make this claim wrong

I would rather state this than have somebody else point it out. This discipline is falsifiable in at least two ways.

If businesses that scale reach against a thin record consistently outperformed those that built the environment first, the sequencing argument would be wrong. And if AI-mediated discovery turned out to reward volume and recency over corroboration and record, then the thing I am saying got more urgent would in fact have got less so.

I do not think either is true, and the second one is genuinely still being decided. Saying so is cheaper than being caught pretending otherwise later, and it is the same standard I would apply to anyone else making a claim about trust.

Where the thinking comes from

Thirty years of watching businesses hold a position or lose it, mostly in brand, reputation, search and growth work. The pattern that produced this discipline is the one I kept seeing from the inside: capable companies buying attention against a record that could not support it, and reading the result as a channel problem.

The related work sits on two other properties. The Marketing Helix is the behavioural model of customers in motion that this rests on. Adaptive Brand Management is the commercial discipline of taking ongoing responsibility for a trust environment, which is what Digilu does.

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