Breaching the Trust Thermocline Is the Biggest Hidden Risk in Business

In large bodies of water, the temperature drops slowly the deeper one dives. That change can, if the descent is slow enough, feel almost imperceptible. Yet at a certain point, the water temperature drops sharply and alarmingly. This point is the thermocline—a near-physical barrier where warm water meets cold. The shift between the two is sudden and dramatic.

In business, particularly digital services or businesses relying on a subscription revenue model, trust works in the same way. Wired into those products and services is a “trust thermocline.” It is a point which, once crossed, otherwise healthy businesses and products suddenly collapse.

The easiest way to understand how trust thermoclines work is to look at how they fail. Content services, both print and digital, are particularly prone to these failures. So are social media networks or businesses that focus on delivering quality-of-life monthly services—from TV streaming to beers of the month. Broadly, any business in which the consumer forming an emotional relationship with the product contributes to adoption is at risk of such failures.

In most cases, that failure follows a pattern: the company or service will be growing, whether in users or revenue, and perhaps rolling out new products that are bundled within an expanded subscription, or showing good adoption on their own. In many cases, there will not even seem to be a new rival in the market, with existing ones failing to threaten them through market share. Then suddenly, over a short period of time, sales and user numbers collapse. Consumers move to seemingly inferior products or simply disengage completely from the business. 

The thermocline has been crossed.

At its simplest, the trust thermocline represents the point at which a consumer decides that the mental cost of staying with a product is outweighed by their desire to abandon it. This may seem like an obvious problem, yet if that were the case, this behavior wouldn’t happen so frequently in technology businesses and in more traditional firms that prided themselves on consumer loyalty, such as car manufacturers and retail chains.

These collapses happen because most businesses fail to properly understand how a reliance on emotional engagement changes the way consumer trust in their product works. That reliance is particularly common with digital products or social media, where personal image, follower count, and “influencer” behavior are a critical part of the user experience.

The greater the emotional engagement, the more trust is a communal asset, not an individual one. In a 2019 paper for the Stanford Technology Law Review, Professor Christopher W. Savage described this collective trust as an “ambient trust commons.” Consumer trust is a pooled resource as well as an individual one. A multitude of micro-infractions for consumers don’t just harm an individual’s experience; they damage that trust commons until the trust thermocline is breached for large groups of users at the same time. 

The concurrent loss of trust by many users is what makes such a breach so dangerous. Many businesses fail to spot the risk of these collapses because they treat customer experience as a linear system. Companies, particularly tech companies, like to see customer experience as a linear system. Linear systems are those in which cause quickly leads to effect. They’re easier to measure and execute strategy around because they imply that there is a “straw that will break the camel’s back” that, correctly identified in time, can be avoided: prices can be gradually raised, a product offering diluted, terms and conditions changed. All of these things can be done as long as enough metrics are being gathered, the growth curve still heads upward, and customer retention services can persuade annoyed users not to cancel.