The income-based trust divide that Edelman documents looks like a societal story at first. The gap between high-income and low-income groups has more than doubled since 2012. But map it onto a buying committee and it becomes a sales story.

Income correlates strongly with organizational seniority. Which means the two groups Edelman is describing, high earners who still largely trust institutions, and lower earners who don't, likely exist inside the same enterprise deal. Executives on one side. Practitioners, analysts, and technical evaluators on the other.

The incentives around risk reinforce this. Decision-makers carry career risk. If a purchase fails, they defend it upward. That exposure makes institutional cues valuable to them: category leaders, established vendors, recognizable names.

Credibility reduces the personal cost of being wrong.

Decision influencers carry a different kind of risk. They have to implement the thing. They absorb the operational pain when vendor promises don't survive contact with reality. Which makes them structurally skeptical of the same cues decision-makers find reassuring. Marketing narratives. Authority claims. Category hype. These don't earn trust with practitioners. They often erode it.

So inside many enterprise deals right now, you have executives trusting the brand while practitioners distrust the claims. The Edelman data suggests this tension is widening.

Most B2B segmentation and messaging hasn't caught up. Campaigns built around transformation, vision, and category authority can increase trust at the top while triggering skepticism further down. The same message, two entirely different receptions, in the same room.

B2B messaging isn't simply speaking to multiple personas within a buying group, it's navigating multiple realities of belief.

We help B2B teams create that kind of clarity through sharper messaging, disciplined creative decisions, and brand systems built to scale.

Here's a finding that cuts against decades of conventional wisdom about global brands.

People trust companies headquartered in their own country far more than foreign ones. The gaps are substantial: 31 points in Canada, 29 points in Japan. These are big numbers representing a structural credibility disadvantage that scale and brand spend don't easily fix.

The globalization playbook assumed that size and reach were trust signals. The bigger the footprint, the more legitimate the company. For a long time, that held. But the Edelman data suggests the logic has inverted. The more interconnected markets have become, the more people reach for local anchors of credibility. Proximity is now doing work that authority used to do.

For B2B brands, this has direct messaging implications. A lot of global companies still lead with scale. Worldwide platform, international network, global leader, etc. Those claims aren't false, but they're increasingly toothless. They signal distance more than competence.

What's gaining traction is the opposite. Regional expertise, local teams, customer relationships in the same geography and the same industry context. The feeling that a vendor actually understands the specific market a buyer is operating in, not just the category in general.

This is another sign of trust moving away from the traditional tent poles. Away from institutions, toward employers. Away from global, toward local. Away from authority signals, toward proximity and proof.

This one is more speculative, but worth thinking through.

The report's core frame is insularity: people retreating into smaller, more familiar circles and becoming less willing to trust things that feel distant or unlike them. That's a societal finding. But if you apply it as a lens to brand strategy, something interesting emerges.

The B2B instinct for years has been to broaden. More use cases, more verticals, more personas. Make the message large enough to catch everyone.

But in a more insular trust environment, breadth might start to work against you. A brand that claims to be for everyone doesn't necessarily start to look like a brand that's for no one in particular as much as it starts to look like it's "not for me." And in a climate where people are already skeptical, that can feel polarizing.

If that logic holds, the brands may need to correct toward feeling specific and bounded. Not because focus is inherently virtuous, but because specificity is becoming a trust signal. It implies you understand a particular problem, a particular context, a particular kind of buyer.

We're reading between the lines here. Edelman isn't making a brand strategy or positioning argument. But the underlying dynamic they're describing, where familiarity and proximity drive trust more than scale or authority, points in that direction.

David Ogilvy said, “the consumer isn't a moron, she's your wife.” The point wasn't about gender. It was about specificity. When you message to everyone, you're messaging to no one. The buyer can feel the difference between a message aimed at them and a message aimed at a demographic.

—Jay