Trust Is Not a Brand Platform

"Trustpilot was founded in 2007 based on the core mission that trust is good for everybody. We help consumers have trust in the businesses and services they buy by looking at authentic reviews. For businesses, we offer the insights for them to build trust, grow, and improve their offerings. We just had our 300 million milestone of total reviews on Trustpilot across the globe, over 1.1 million domains."

The founding premise of Trustpilot is that the information asymmetry between a consumer making a purchase decision and a brand selling to them creates a market failure that authentic reviews can help correct. The platform is designed to be open, which means businesses cannot remove negative reviews, and to be authentic, which means Trustpilot invests heavily in detecting and removing fake ones. The commercial value to brands comes not from protecting their reputation but from the operational feedback and the conversion impact of genuine trust signals.

"Trustpilot is very much a household name in the UK. In the US, people recognise it once they know about it but the awareness is much lower. We identified that the strategy for the US, the place we had permission to play, was not in retail or travel, which have amazing organisations that do that well. But in services like fintech, insurance, any type of high customer lifetime value where someone is making a purchase decision maybe once or twice in their life, like a mortgage or an auto loan."

Bodine's framing of permission to play is a disciplined market strategy applied to a well-known brand entering a new geography. Rather than trying to compete across all categories, Trustpilot identified where its differentiation, particularly in review authenticity for high-stakes decisions, was most commercially valuable. The financial services focus also connects to Bodine's personal background in fintech and financial inclusion, which gave her an unusually grounded perspective on the target customer.

"I think in the past we have all built brand platforms, overarching messaging strategy, values, and sometimes you get eye rolls of marketers talking about trust and authenticity. But now we actually have ROI and hard data to back up the value of that trust. It drives 8X click-through rates when we use Trustpilot branding on digital ads. The Forrester work showed that implementing our premium features drives a 400% return on investment. And just by a brand increasing their trust score by one point drives an 8X increase in purchase conversion."

The shift from trust as a brand value to trust as a commercial metric is precisely the shift that makes Trustpilot's marketing message credible with CMOs and CFOs who have historically been sceptical of the commercial case for brand investment. The Forrester data provides a specific, independently validated number that can be presented to a board. The FTC ruling adds a compliance dimension that elevates the conversation further. Trust is no longer a nice-to-have but a legally required and commercially measurable business practice.

"The FTC just passed a ruling to ban fake reviews. We help consult them with our coalition partners to find ways to remove fake reviews. We removed 3.3 million fake reviews last year alone. 80% of that we detected through AI and machine learning. The data is there that people are trying to mislead consumers. And for us, that is an important point that we need to bring to brands to say you have to protect yourself too."

The FTC ruling converts what was a reputational risk into a legal one. Brands that were generating or tolerating fake reviews now face potential FTC action if they do not address the issue. For Trustpilot, which has invested in AI detection and human moderation to remove fake reviews at scale, the ruling creates a powerful commercial argument: using Trustpilot is not just good for brand trust but is now part of responsible business practice in a regulated environment.

"We do robust ABM and understand that there is not one decision maker on budget and unlocking the decision to invest in a partner like Trustpilot. We look at that larger buying committee. Our target audience is marketers, marketing decision makers, executives, and customer experience professionals. So the chief customer officer, CX, that type of thing."

The buying committee for a trust platform like Trustpilot spans multiple functions because trust touches multiple parts of the customer experience. The CMO cares about brand equity and conversion metrics. The CX professional cares about the feedback loop that reviews provide. The CEO or board cares about regulatory compliance and the commercial case for trust investment. ABM for Trustpilot requires different content and different proof points for each of these audiences, connected by the overarching argument that authentic trust is commercially measurable and regulatorily important.