The trust recession: Why human-led research and insights are more important than ever

We live in a time when anyone with a WiFi connection and a confident tone can be seen as a credible source. Conspiracy theories are shared over coffee. Politicians lie with straight faces. Social media spins reality into whatever version suits the algorithm best, and in the middle of it all, trust is quietly bleeding out.

We’re clearly in a trust recession, and it’s not just about fake news or dodgy Facebook ads. It is something deeper, more systemic. We have stopped believing in businesses, the media and the government institutions. Just take a look at the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer and you will see that across Europe, the US, Australia, Japan and South Korea more people distrust business, government and the media than trust them. This is fuelled by more than two in three people now believing they are lied to by government, business leaders and journalists. The media comes in for particular criticism. Three in four believe news organisations prioritise growing audiences above communicating what people need to know and two in three believe they adhere to an ideology rather than inform the public.

Data everywhere, but can you trust it?

Against this background of growing distrust, brands are still trying to build meaningful relationships with people. They’re trying to stay relevant, trying to grow, but without trust, how is it possible?

The irony, of course, is that marketers and business leaders are surrounded by the data they think they need to build relationships with consumers. But the conundrum remains – can the data being used to build trust be trusted itself unless it’s shaped by human research and insights?

It feels like it should be easy. After all, we’re surrounded by more data than ever before, and business leaders have been led to believe AI is the way to make sense of it all. The latest technology is always sold on the mantra that insights are easy and reliable. Just open your dashboard, sprinkle in some AI magic, maybe a synthetic persona or two, and voila, instant strategy. Except it doesn’t work like that. If you don’t know where the data has come from, how it was built, or what inherent biases it carries, then you are not doing insight. You are doing guesswork with a smarter user interface.

This is where human-led research, the proper kind, becomes not just important, but essential, because if trust is broken, then research is how we begin to stitch it back together. Not just for consumers, but for the brands trying to serve them.

Done right, research does not just tell you what people said. It helps you understand what they meant. It peels back the surface, it hears what was not spoken. That takes structure, rigour and yes, it takes actual human beings. Call me old fashioned, but sometimes talking to real people and asking good questions still beats feeding noise into a machine and calling it insight.

Now, to be clear, AI absolutely has a role to play. It is helping us spot patterns faster, process information more efficiently and get to answers we might never have seen otherwise. But AI is only ever as good as the data it is fed and the questions it is trained to answer. If we do not understand how that genie was made, then we cannot possibly trust the wishes it grants.

This is why at Hall & Partners, and the wider Escalent Group, we’ve been developing AI tools to not replace human input but to help us analyse responses more deeply and at scale. For example, we’ve been able to advise a banking group on their use of language in different regions through talking to their customers and analysing results in AI. We’ve done the same for an ad platform and helped to shine a light on the features it could use to appeal more to brands and their agencies.

AI-enabled tools so shiny, they obscure insight

The challenge is that too many people fall in love with the tech. They chase the tool rather than the truth. We see this every day. Maybe its fuelled by the media buying or creative processes that are increasingly tech led. I don’t know but it’s a pattern I’m seeing that’s somewhat polluting the insights agenda. Businesses obsessed with process, dazzled by dashboards, seduced by synthetic personas that are about as emotionally nuanced as a toaster. Meanwhile, the real job of insight, understanding human behaviour and helping brands make smarter decisions, quietly slips down the agenda with AI-enabled insights tools.

There is a dangerous idea creeping into the boardroom that speed and scale are all that matter. That the job of insight is done once you have run the numbers. But insight is not a numbers game, it’s a meaning game and that means asking hard questions. It means validating data, not just collecting it. It means knowing when the model is wrong, even when the graph looks right (and let’s be honest, knowing when the graph looks wrong too!).

In a world where anyone can produce data with a click and a prompt, the quality of that data is now the biggest differentiator. Due diligence is not optional. Without it, we risk building brands on sand, and from what I recall of my childhood – sandcastles look cool for a while…. But they rarely last past the next big wave. Worse, we risk making decisions that erode the very trust we are trying to rebuild.

How brands can lead with human-insights and earn consumer trust?

First, consumer trust is not a nice to have, it’s the currency of modern branding. People do not want to be targeted. They want to be understood. They aren’t your customer; you are THEIR brand. The only way to understand them is through honest, respectful, high-quality persona-based research.

Second, insights teams need to be louder. Bolder. More visible. We cannot sit quietly in the corner while tech leads the conversation. We need to be in the boardroom, reminding leaders that data without context is dangerous. We need to remove the silo, tech, ai, synthetic – it’s all just means to an end. The core practice doesn’t change but its influence needs to. Tools without human judgment are just noise.

Remember, the customer is not a metric, they are a person.

Third, and maybe most importantly, we need to do a better job of championing insight as an industry. We need to talk about the difference between real understanding and surface level spin. We need to celebrate the power of asking good questions. We need to push back against the idea that AI alone can unlock the mysteries of human behaviour. Because if we do not, someone else will own the customer... and they might not even be human.

Human insight guides smart brands

Brands that win in this environment will be those who stay relentlessly focused on the customer. Not the tech, not the process. The person. That requires insight that is grounded in reality, not simulated by code. It requires transparency in how we collect data, how we interpret it and how we act on it. It requires the kind of research that earns trust, not just clicks.

There is no shortcut to trust, no silver bullet. But there is a way forward. It starts with remembering what insight is for. Not to look clever in a slide deck, not to generate noise, but to create real impact. To help businesses grow in ways that matter to the people they serve.

So, yes, the trust recession is real. But like any recession, it creates an opportunity. For brands that choose to double down on understanding. For leaders who invest in the truth, even when it is uncomfortable. For insights teams who are not afraid to remind the world that trust does not come from a model. It comes from listening, asking, challenging and caring enough to get it right.

Trust might just be the new oil. But unlike oil, we cannot drill for it. We have to earn it.