Trusted Enough to Become the Answer

TRENDSETTERS | Martyn Etherington, CMO of BMC Software.

There was something refreshingly grounded about speaking with Martyn Etherington recently.

At a moment when much of the marketing conversation around AI feels dominated by acceleration, automation, and speculation, Martyn’s perspective was strikingly simple: the future may belong less to louder brands — and more to trusted ones.

That may sound almost old-fashioned. But in many ways, it is becoming newly urgent.

It is a subtle but profound shift.

For years, marketers focused on visibility, impressions, clicks, and funnel optimization. But as AI increasingly mediates discovery and decision-making, the battleground itself is changing. Buyers are no longer simply searching. Increasingly, they are asking.

And AI systems are beginning to shape the shortlist before a customer ever visits a website or speaks with a salesperson.

He cited research suggesting that nearly 78% of buyers now research products and services extensively online before ever contacting a sales department. Especially in enterprise categories, that research increasingly includes analyst reports, peer reviews, customer commentary, expert recommendations, and broader digital reputation signals.

In other words, authority itself is becoming part of the infrastructure of discovery.

That is why Martyn Etherington believes we are entering what he describes as a “post-trust era” — one where trust functions less as a brand claim and more as a form of earned currency.

“Trust is not something you declare,” he noted during our conversation. “It’s something companies must consistently demonstrate and deliver on.”

That distinction matters enormously in an AI-driven environment.

After all, AI systems are not evaluating brands emotionally in the way humans once did through advertising alone. They are synthesizing signals: reviews, consistency, credibility, proof, reputation, validation, expertise, and repeated association.

As Martyn puts it, marketing today increasingly speaks to both “carbon and silicon” audiences — humans and machines simultaneously.

And both, in different ways, are searching for confidence.

From Visibility to Authority

One of the more significant ideas in Martyn’s thinking is that AI may be collapsing long-standing distinctions between brand building and demand generation.

For years, marketers often separated “brand” from “performance”:

• brand was considered long-term and difficult to measure
• demand generation was considered measurable, immediate, and tied to pipeline

But AI changes the equation.

If AI systems increasingly shape recommendations, summarize competitive landscapes, and pre-curate shortlists, then authority itself begins influencing:

• conversion efficiency
• sales velocity
• pricing power
• recommendation likelihood
• customer confidence
• and ultimately growth

In other words, reputation becomes discoverability.

That is why Martyn believes elements once considered “support functions” in B2B marketing are becoming more strategic:

• analyst relations
• customer advocacy
• peer reviews
• earned media
• thought leadership
• ecosystem credibility
• operational proof

All of these signals increasingly contribute to how both humans and machines interpret trustworthiness.

As he wrote: “The question increasingly becomes: ‘Will the AI mention or cite us at all?’”

Why Consistency Matters More Now

If AI systems synthesize repeated patterns and associations, inconsistency itself becomes more visible.

That has implications far beyond communications strategy.

Great positioning, Martyn noted, may become even more important in the AI era precisely because machines reward clarity, repetition, and authority. Fragmented narratives, weak differentiation, or inflated claims become easier to expose when systems compare signals at scale.

In many ways, AI may not be changing the fundamentals of branding as much as exposing them.

Trust, after all, has always been built through experience, delivery, reputation, and proof — not simply amplification.

That is why Martyn Etherington’s perspective feels especially resonant right now. It does not come from technological hype. It comes from decades of experience observing how enterprise decisions are actually made.

And perhaps that is the deeper lesson.

AI may accelerate recommendation, compress discovery, and reshape the mechanics of decision-making. But the companies most likely to thrive may still be the ones grounded in something fundamentally human: credibility earned over time.

Or as Martyn’s perspective ultimately suggests: The future may belong not to the brands shouting the loudest — but to those trusted enough to become the answer.