Humanity On Strike: Re-Engaging A Distrustful Public.
Loneliness and Cynicism Demand Brands Reconnect Through Shared Purpose.
The Retreat From Trust
Public trust has been eroding for more than a decade, but the 2025 data clarifies how severe the fracture has become. The Edelman Trust Barometer now shows that government and media fail to cross the 50% credibility threshold globally, leaving business as the only institution still regarded as both competent and ethical. At the same time, Gallup’s worldwide well-being index reports that loneliness has overtaken stress and anger as the most frequently cited human condition.
This dual collapse, institutional distrust paired with social isolation, produces an audience that does not simply ignore advertising but actively rejects it. The disengagement is strategic: people skip ads, mute campaigns, and assume that corporate statements are engineered rather than sincere. The strike is not metaphorical; it is operational, with measurable effects.
Campaign reach numbers may look strong, but conversion rates fall, repeat engagement stalls, and the link between messaging and action breaks down. For brands, the cost of this disconnection is not limited to wasted spend; it undermines long-term equity, because an audience that distrusts the messenger will not carry the memory of the message.
Facilitate Belonging, Don’t Just Broadcast
Traditional marketing logic still prioritizes broadcast: buy reach, dominate share of voice, and assume scale produces trust. But in a climate of distrust, scale without participation is noise. Deloitte’s 2024 consumer trends research highlights that almost three-quarters of Gen Z actively prefer brands that create participatory channels over those that only advertise. The lesson is clear: belonging, not exposure, determines relevance.
Nike Run Club demonstrates this principle in practice. What began as a digital tool for tracking runs became a global platform for collective identity. By linking performance data with local meetups and online communities, Nike transformed engagement from individual consumption into shared experience. The shoe became secondary; what mattered was membership in a living system.
In the Middle East, Careem’s “Rewards for Good” translated the same idea into a transactional environment. Allowing riders to donate points to social causes reframed a loyalty scheme into a civic tool. Instead of positioning itself as a logistics app, Careem repositioned itself as an enabler of community action.
Both examples show that belonging is constructed through infrastructure that lets people act together, not through slogans, not through one-off ads, but through durable systems that make participation natural.
Align With Real Movements, Not Manufactured Moments
One of the sharpest signals in Brandbuch’s Purpose Trends 2025 is the rejection of symbolic gestures. Kantar’s 2024 Purpose Study confirms the risk: two out of three consumers believe companies exaggerate their role in social change. That perception gap destroys credibility. When brands align with fleeting hashtags or shallow campaigns, audiences detect the opportunism and withdraw belief.
In the Gulf, Almarai has taken a parallel approach from a very different starting point. Food security is not a fashionable topic but an existential concern in a region dependent on imports. By making food security a visible operational priority, Almarai positions itself not as a neutral supplier but as a stakeholder in regional stability.
Both examples underline the same conclusion: credibility in engagement is not claimed through tone but proven through alignment with real movements that are already meaningful to the audience.
The Currency Of Authentic Engagement
The return on shifting from broadcast to belonging and from symbolic gestures to substantive alignment is not only cultural; it is financial. WARC’s 2024 analysis of effective brand purpose found that campaigns enabling participation delivered nearly 50% higher likelihood of market share growth than campaigns that relied purely on top-down messaging. This matters because it shifts engagement from a soft metric to a hard driver of equity.
Authenticity, in this context, operates as a currency. For publics that no longer trust governments or media, brands that create credible ways to act together effectively substitute for civic institutions. Participation becomes a proxy for trust. When people feel their involvement, donating points, attending a run, contributing to a social cause, produces visible outcomes, they reward the brand with loyalty and advocacy.
That loyalty is not symbolic; it has capital consequences. Retention improves, advocacy drives acquisition, and the brand’s role in people’s lives extends beyond transaction. Authentic engagement becomes the stabilizer in an unstable trust environment.
Bottom Line: Re-Engagement Requires Shared Purpose
A public on strike will not return for campaigns. They return when brands create belonging, align with movements that matter, and demonstrate purpose through credible action.
