The art of becoming

The know, like, trust framework, too often touted as the golden path to winning customers, is rooted in a simple premise: Prospects must first know who you are, then like your brand, which leads to trust. It’s a marketing mantra that falls into the category of things we’ve heard so often it must be true.

It’s not.

Know, like and trust happens outside of marketing. It happens through engagement. What can happen through marketing, however, is desire, resonance and advocacy.

Limitations

For starters, the know, like, trust framework assumes a linear, predictable progression in the relationship between a brand and its customers. The reality is much messier and a lot less predictable. Let’s break it down.

Let’s start with know. In today’s marketplace where attention is fragmented across countless channels and competitors, achieving basic awareness is already a monumental challenge. Actually getting an audience to truly know your brand? That’s an even steeper climb. While product companies might find this easier due to category differentiation, for service-based businesses like real estate brokerage or for agents where competition is intense and offerings often similar, the marketing investment required to achieve genuine brand recognition is typically beyond reach.

As for like, this component is even more challenging. Likeability is highly subjective and contextual. What one person finds charming and appealing, another may find off-putting or unremarkable. The reality is, trying to engineer likeability at scale is fraught with difficulty. True likeability has to come from direct experience. Real contact. Real interaction. The face to face engagement with people.

Finally, trust. Trust, like know and like, requires consistent, transparent, and repeatable interactions. Trust cannot be manufactured through marketing. All marketing can ever do is to remind people why they trust you. Trust happens when you make promises or commitments you deliver on consistently.

This linear framework of know → like implies that trust will be the natural byproduct. This is a myth. Consider how many people you know and like, but might not actually trust.

Trust is a much more complex and fragile outcome.

Desire. Resonance. Advocacy.

While know, like, trust has a rhythm to it. That’s about it. Brands need a deeper, executable strategy.

A brand’s primary aim is not to be known, it’s to generate a genuine and visceral desire for its product or services. Desire is about creating a magnetic pull through branding and marketing that makes people crave your products or services. To create desire, you must tap into emotional drivers, true aspirations, and the unmet needs of your ideal customers that your brand will fulfill.

Effective marketing must also strive to create a harmony between your brand’s identity and your customers’ reality. When your style, voice, and belief system authentically resonate with or align with their values and pain points, customers begin to see your brand as an extension of themselves. At this level, your unique value proposition naturally emerges. Like shifts from being about your services or products to being about how your brand fits in their lives. They don’t just buy from you; they identify through you. When that happens, they don’t just like you, they will love you.

Advocacy. The ultimate goal for any brand should be to inspire passionate advocacy among its customers. This goes beyond simply retaining customers — it’s about transforming them into vocal champions who actively promote and defend the brand to their friends, family, and wider networks. In other words, referrals.

Advocacy is trust on steroids. It’s the hallmark of a brand that has succeeded in building something meaningful and irreplaceable.

The art of becoming

To achieve desire, resonance, and advocacy requires more than traditional marketing approaches, but the rewards far outweigh those of the know, like, trust framework. This is the art of becoming the brand you want to be — a journey that demands deeper customer insights, a bolder creative vision, and genuine differentiation. Above all, it requires unwavering commitment to delivering a brand experience that moves people to action.