Why Do Sales and Marketing Feel Like Lies?
Updated: Sep 7
The other day, I realized I was buying expensive coffee and cheap coffee at the same time. That probably tells you more about the state of American consumer trust than I realized when I did it.
There is a coffee company I like called Fablea Coffee. I like what the company says it stands for, and I like the idea behind the product. They market their coffee around things like mold testing and quality, and I am willing to spend more because I believe—or maybe hope is the better word—that I'm paying for something that's better for me. But here's the weird part: I still buy cheap coffee from my local grocery store too. Why? Because some part of me is waiting to find out I've been screwed.
I want to be very clear that I don't have evidence that this particular company is screwing me. I actually like them. This isn't really about Fablea at all. It's about everybody who came before them. Somewhere along the way, so many institutions, companies, advertisements, influencers, and people trying to sell me things disappointed me that now even when I find something I genuinely like, a little part of my brain says, Yeah, but what if they're full of shit too?
And apparently, I don't even completely trust my coffee.
I Started Investigating My Own Distrust
This is essentially how I use the critical-thinking model I teach in my business work. I don't like starting with, I believe this, therefore it must be true. I start with myself. What am I noticing? How am I behaving? What am I buying? What am I avoiding? What am I afraid of? Then I use AI as a mirror to challenge and research what I'm seeing. From there, I look at the market, I look at the math, and finally I look at what I call the Mojo: Does this actually fit what I value, believe, and see happening around me?
When I did that with trust, I realized how far my own distrust had spread. I don't automatically trust companies anymore. I don't automatically trust influencers or social media. I don't particularly care what a celebrity tells me to buy because I don't know what they're being paid to say. I've become skeptical of higher education after watching young people I love graduate with significant debt and struggle to translate those degrees into the lives they thought those degrees would provide. I use AI constantly and believe it can be incredibly useful, particularly for small businesses, but AI has also given me another reason to question what I'm seeing. A beautiful image, video, testimonial, article, or piece of marketing may not even be what it appears to be anymore.
I even find myself questioning food. I have a garden that I affectionately call my AI garden because I've used AI to help me learn how to grow it. Part of what makes growing my own food appealing is simply knowing where something came from. When another foodborne illness outbreak makes the news, it becomes another tiny reminder that even the systems responsible for feeding us aren't systems we experience as completely predictable or safe.
So I looked at my own behavior and thought, Okay, Angela, maybe you're just cynical.
Then I looked at my business.
People seemed to be taking longer to make purchasing decisions. New relationships required more nurturing. Things that once moved more quickly required more proof. Even with an established audience and years of visibility in my field, I could see that people were becoming more careful about where they put their money.
Then I tested the idea in a room full of business owners.
Recently, I was part of a small workshop about using podcasting as relationship marketing. It was supposed to be about podcasting. Instead, it basically turned into business group therapy. We started talking about how difficult business feels right now: sales, marketing, getting people to commit, figuring out what people want, and understanding why strategies that used to work don't seem to be working the same way anymore.
Then the conversation shifted to our own behavior as customers. Person after person started telling some version of the same story: I don't trust anybody either.
That's when I went looking for the numbers.
Businesses Think We Trust Them. We Don't.
One of the most startling statistics I found came from PwC's 2024 Trust Survey. According to PwC, 90% of executives believed customers highly trusted their companies, while only 30% of consumers said they highly trusted companies.
Think about the size of that gap. Businesses are sitting on one side of the relationship saying, They trust us. Customers are sitting on the other side saying, No, the fuck we don't.
And trust isn't simply a soft, feel-good concept. PwC's research has also connected customer trust with business performance. So when companies wonder why customers aren't behaving the way they used to, perhaps we're asking the wrong question. Instead of only asking, Why aren't people buying?, we may need to start asking, Why should they believe us?
The more I researched, the less this looked like an isolated sales problem and the more it looked cultural. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer surveyed approximately 33,000 people across 28 countries and found that 61% had a moderate or high sense of grievance—a measure that included beliefs that government and business make people's lives harder, serve narrow interests, and allow wealthy people to benefit unfairly. Edelman's research also found widespread concern that leaders deliberately mislead people.
Now think about what that means when someone encounters your advertisement.
Your potential customer isn't experiencing your ad in isolation. They're bringing every other experience they've ever had with sales and marketing into the interaction. They're bringing the subscription that was incredibly easy to start and mysteriously difficult to cancel. They're bringing the influencer who didn't make it clear enough that they were being paid. They're bringing the company that promised one thing and delivered another, the product that didn't live up to the hype, the perfectly curated social-media post, and now the AI-generated image or video they aren't entirely sure is real.
Then your perfectly lovely small business walks into the room and says, Trust me.
No wonder they're skeptical.
Now Every Dollar Feels Riskier
There's another important piece of this trust recession: people don't just feel less trusting. Many people also feel financially less safe.
A 2026 Alter Agents consumer study found that 73% of consumers were reducing spending on nonessential purchases, while 34% said they were reducing spending even on essentials. Forty-two percent reported postponing or canceling major life events. That matters enormously for businesses because when people have less financial margin, every purchasing decision carries more weight.
A customer hesitating to buy from you may not be saying, I don't see your value. They may be saying, I have fewer dollars available, every dollar feels riskier, and I've been disappointed enough times that I'm going to need significantly more evidence before I give this one to you.
That changes sales. It changes marketing. It changes how long trust takes. And I think businesses that interpret all of that hesitation as simply another "objection to overcome" risk making the problem even worse. If somebody is already afraid you're trying to manipulate them out of their money, responding with a better manipulation strategy probably isn't going to rebuild the relationship.
We Have Become Consumer Private Investigators
This is where my 20 years as a sex therapist started giving me a very different way of looking at what we're seeing.
I've spent a significant portion of my career helping couples recover after infidelity, which is one of the most significant breaches of trust a relationship can experience. After someone discovers a betrayal, they often go into what I think of as private-investigator mode. They want information. What happened? When? Who knew? What else don't I know? Show me the phone. Show me the messages. Help me understand what was real.
They're searching for information because the reality they thought they understood has been disrupted.
I started wondering whether something analogous—not identical, and certainly not clinically equivalent—is happening with consumers. We've been marketed to so aggressively, tracked so thoroughly, sold to so constantly, and disappointed enough times that many of us have become investigators before we buy.
I know I have. Before I spend money with a new company, I Google it. I read reviews. I ask people I trust. I compare prices. I research alternatives. I wait. I watch what the company does. I see whether they're still saying the same thing three weeks later. I look for evidence that the product actually does what they claim it does. Sometimes, apparently, I buy both the expensive coffee and the cheap coffee because even breakfast now requires a risk-management strategy.
That's not a particularly healthy environment for businesses or customers, but it is the environment we're selling in.
Good Businesses Are Paying the Trust Tax
This may be the part that frustrates me the most. There are genuinely good businesses struggling right now. There are people who care about their customers. There are entrepreneurs creating useful products, clinicians doing meaningful work, educators with important knowledge, restaurants trying to survive, consultants trying to help, creators making good things, and organizations genuinely trying to serve their communities.
Those businesses are now paying what I think of as a trust tax created partly by everyone who came before them.
You didn't necessarily create your customer's distrust, but you're selling inside of it. Your customer isn't only responding to you. They're responding to every time somebody else made them feel stupid for buying, pressured them into something they didn't need, hid the real price until the last possible moment, made an absurd promise, manufactured urgency, sold their information, trapped them in a subscription, or simply failed to deliver what they said they would.
That's why saying I'm one of the good ones isn't enough anymore. Your customer has heard that before.
They're going to need evidence.
And I think that's where the future of sales and marketing gets much more interesting. If simply telling people you're trustworthy doesn't work anymore, businesses are going to have to figure out how to let people experience enough of the truth that they can decide whether they trust you for themselves.
I'm already seeing clues about what that looks like in my own business, in other businesses, in entertainment, and in what I find myself willing to spend money on as a consumer.
Three things keep showing up: comedy, controversy, and experience.
But underneath all three is something much bigger.
We're looking for what feels real.
And that's where this investigation goes next.
Read Part 2: What Actually Sells When Nobody Trusts Anything?
