Ever improving experiences and the new era of trust: Introducing Trustpilot’s new brand

Towards the end of last year, Trustpilot turned ten. I’m proud that during this first decade, we built a leading online review platform.

In doing so, we helped millions of consumers make better choices. And we helped hundreds of thousands of companies build more trusted brands, get closer to their customers, and accelerate their business.

But the world doesn’t stand still.

So for the past six months we’ve spoken to thousands of companies and consumers to identify how to best reflect the times we live in today and tomorrow.

The new Trustpilot brand we’ve launched today builds on everything we’ve achieved in our first decade and everything we’ve discovered during this exploration.

I believe these changes stand us apart from every other review company today.

We have learned and discovered that:

• We now live in a ‘Customer Era’ where consumer expectations, choice, and empowerment are unlike anything the world has seen.

• While most companies haven’t yet fully understood this change, the most progressive companies have.

• They’re tapping into consumers’ desire to shape and improve their world by openly collaborating with consumers on Trustpilot (and elsewhere). As a result, these companies are innovating and improving faster than their peers.

• At the same time, Trust in digital platforms (including social media and reviews sites) has fallen dramatically as the extent to which they can be manipulated to obfuscate the truth has hit mass consciousness. The ‘fake news’ meme and Facebook’s well documented troubles relating to Cambridge Analytica were the straws that broke the camel’s back, pushing the issue onto every front page worldwide. But the issue has been brewing for a long time. This year alone, for example, trust in digital platforms fell in 21 of the 28 countries polled annually in Edelman’s annual Trust Index.

• When consumers discover that most review sites aren’t totally independent or transparent - for example, by allowing companies to edit, hide, or delete some consumer reviews - trust can be destroyed in a flash.

• Moreover, consumers increasingly feel frustrated, even cheated, when reviews are used as one way marketing collateral rather than a two way conversation.

Our new brand reflects these changes. More than just a rating, Trustpilot stars should signify to the world that a company has nothing to hide, loves their customers, and wants to keep improving their service experience by tapping into consumers’ genuine desire to shape and improve things.

And this is only possible on a transparent and independent review platform like ours that’s open to all.

Based on these insights and a lot of hard work and creativity, we built a new brand mission, creative identity, and key attributes.

• Our new mission is ‘to bring companies and consumers together to create ever-improving experiences for everyone’. We do this by ensuring openness and collaboration are at the core of our platform and everything we do.

• Our new logo is a green star with a three dimensional green arrow that points to the future. Companies consistently told us they love its simplicity and timeless beauty and that it better represents the unique power of our platform than our old tick mark logo.

• We simplified how we write our name. We’ve made it less ‘shouty’ (it’s now lowercase) while maintaining its authority.

• We use photography and storytelling liberally because behind every review is a real human experience.

We’ve kept our TrustBoxes (aka widgets) largely the same to make any transition easy for customers. For others still considering Trustpilot, you can be assured that we’ve updated our TrustBoxes with our new logo, providing the credibility and power we believe is reflected through our new brand identity and stars.

• We’ve changed the logo and word mark as described above, updated our rating system stars to the same design as the new logo (so they’re instantly recognisable) and made the green background fresher and brighter.

• Companies and consumers have consistently told us the new TrustBoxes look more modern, work as powerfully as ever, and look at home on nearly every website and marketing execution.

Over the coming weeks and months we’ll tell you more about a series of further changes we’ll be implementing to make our platform even more transparent. And we’ll share new tools that help companies and consumers collaborate even better.

I believe these changes build on our past and set the consumers and companies who rely on us up for a brighter, better and more collaborative future.

Sparked your interest? Learn more about Trustpilot here!