It has never been easier for a brand to be visible. We have social media, digital platforms, influencers, podcasts, traditional media and now AI making it possible to produce and distribute more content than ever before.

Yet, despite all these opportunities to be seen, I believe one of the greatest challenges facing South African brands today is something much more difficult to achieve: being trusted. Visibility can be bought but trust can’t.

For me, this distinction has become increasingly important in public relations. A brand can have an impressive media presence, a beautiful campaign and an active social media platform, but none of that matters if the experience of its employees, customers and other stakeholders doesn’t match what it says about itself.

And in South Africa, brands are operating in an environment where people are already questioning the institutions around them. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found that 71% of South Africans held a moderate or high sense of grievance towards business, government and the wealthy. It also found that 65% of South Africans said it was becoming harder to distinguish between news from a respected media source and information from someone attempting to deceive them.

The 2026 findings add another layer to this challenge, with 68% of South Africans saying they are hesitant or unwilling to trust someone whose values, information sources, approaches to societal problems or backgrounds differ from their own. For communicators, those numbers matter. They tell us that the audiences we are trying to reach are not simply consuming messages, they are questioning them.

Reputation is revealed when it is tested

One of the things I have learnt over the years is that reputation is not built when everything is going well, it’s revealed when it is tested. Every organisation will eventually face a moment when the promises it has made are measured against what it actually does.

Earlier this year, I watched this play out with a client operating in a highly complex sector during a period of industry-wide supply constraints. For obvious reasons, I will not name the organisation, but what stood out to me was that when the pressure arrived, it did not suddenly have to become the company it had always claimed to be.

Its focus had consistently been on reliability and ensuring that its customers could continue operating. When supply became constrained, that commitment was tested. The organisation worked to manage the shortages and ensure its customers continued receiving what they needed.

From a reputation perspective, that mattered. There was no need to suddenly manufacture a new story or make grand public statements about what the organisation stood for, its actions were already telling the story.

That, to me, is where reputation becomes real. There will always come a time when the image a brand has carefully built is tested, the question is whether the organisation behaves consistently when conditions are difficult.

Visibility without credibility is just noise

This also challenges the way we think about media visibility as PR practitioners. We naturally want our clients to be seen, but I don’t believe our role is simply to secure as much coverage as possible. Sometimes the most strategic advice we can give a client is not to speak, it’s to wait and to listen.

And sometimes it’s to step forward very clearly because silence could create a vacuum that others will fill, the skill lies in knowing the difference. This has become particularly important in a media environment where misinformation and distrust are already making audiences more sceptical.

If 65% of South Africans are struggling to determine whether the information they encounter comes from a credible media source, simply adding more content to the environment is not enough.

Brands have to give people a reason to believe them, interestingly, despite this broader climate of scepticism, brands themselves still hold considerable trust. Edelman’s 2025 Brand Trust research found that 84% of South Africans trust the brands they personally use to do what is right, that is an extraordinary privilege, but it is also a responsibility.

Trust is built through people

Perhaps this is the part of reputation management that matters most to me personally. We spend a great deal of time talking about audiences, stakeholders, consumers and target markets, but behind every one of those terms are people.

People remember whether an organisation listened to them, they remember how they were treated when something went wrong. They remember whether a leader was present only when there was good news to announce or whether that leader remained visible during difficult periods too.

The same is true of client relationships, some of the strongest relationships I have built throughout my career have developed over many years. They have survived changing economic conditions, difficult conversations, successes and setbacks because trust was never treated as a campaign. It was built quietly, through consistency.

South Africa’s current trust environment makes this human element even more important. The 2025 Trust Barometer found that 78% of South Africans trusted their employer to do what is right. The 2026 research goes further, suggesting that employers and business leaders are increasingly expected to act as trust brokers in an environment where people are retreating into smaller, more familiar circles. For organisations, this means stakeholder engagement cannot begin when something goes wrong. Relationships have to exist before they are needed.

Put your money where your mouth is

There is a phrase we use often: put your money where your mouth is, and I think brands need to take it seriously. If you position yourself as a company that cares about its people, your employees should experience that care.

If reliability is central to your brand promise, customers should experience that reliability when circumstances become difficult. If you speak about community, transformation or inclusion, stakeholders should be able to see evidence of those commitments beyond a campaign.

Because eventually the brand promise and the lived experience meet and when they do, no communications strategy can permanently hide the distance between them. This does not mean organisations must be perfect, people understand that businesses make mistakes and that difficult circumstances arise.

What matters is whether there is consistency between what an organisation says it believes and how it behaves when those beliefs become inconvenient. That is where credibility lives.

For South African brands, the challenge ahead is therefore not simply how to remain visible in an increasingly crowded communications environment. The harder question is whether people will believe us when they see us.

Visibility may introduce a brand, and reputation may open the door, but trust is what makes people stay.