A brand may command attention, dominate conversations and attract millions of views, yet still struggle to earn the one thing that determines whether consumers stay with it: credibility.

That distinction formed the heart of Dr. Omotola Bamigbaiye Elatuyi’s presentation at the 2026 EDGE National Stakeholders’ Summit, where the seasoned commercial and strategic planning professional challenged marketers to look beyond awareness and visibility and focus more deliberately on the evidence, experience and behaviour that make consumers believe a brand.

Bamigbaiye Elatuyi delivered the lead presentation for the second session of the virtual summit on Thursday, September 24, examining the theme, “The Credibility Mandate: Navigating Trust, Truth and Transience in Marketing Communications.”

Organised by MARKETING EDGE Publications Limited, the summit brought together marketing and communications professionals for discussions around two major industry themes: “Cultural Authenticity as Currency: Turning Heritage into Modern Branding & Marketing” and “The Credibility Mandate: Navigating Trust, Truth and Transience in Marketing Communications.”

Opening the second session, Bamigbaiye Elatuyi placed a fundamental question before marketers: can consumers still believe the brands making promises to them?

She argued that the question has become increasingly important in an environment where brands can generate enormous awareness through advertising, social media engagement, celebrity endorsements and viral content, while the proliferation of user generated and AI generated content has made it increasingly difficult for consumers to distinguish authentic claims from manufactured ones.

According to her, visibility and credibility are not interchangeable. Against this development, she noted that, a brand can become highly visible without necessarily becoming believable,  stressing that awareness alone does not establish the level of trust required for sustained consumer relationships.

She pointed to everyday consumer decisions to illustrate the importance of that trust. People keep their money with banks because they expect those institutions to safeguard it.

“They select telecommunications providers because they expect the networks to work where they need them. Likewise, consumers make decisions about food and pharmaceutical products based on an expectation that the brands will deliver on their promises.”

For Bamigbaiye Elatuyi, every such decision represents an act of trust because consumers commit their money, time and emotional confidence based on what a brand promises to deliver.

She therefore urged marketers to examine what remains of a brand when its advertising is removed and determine whether consumers would still have sufficient reasons to believe in it.

From that standpoint, she presented credibility as a relationship between four critical elements: the promise a brand makes, the truth behind that promise, the experience consumers receive and the behaviour of the organisation and its wider stakeholders.

The promise represents what a brand tells consumers it will deliver. Truth, however, requires the organisation to demonstrate that the claim can actually be substantiated.

According to her, experience then determines what consumers encounter when they interact with the brand, while organisational behaviour reveals whether employees, partners and other stakeholders consistently act in ways that support the brand promise.

Furthermore, Bamigbaiye Elatuyi warned that credibility begins to weaken when significant gaps emerge between those elements. She affirmed that, a  compelling promise cannot compensate indefinitely for poor customer experience.

Similarly,  she added that, strong advertising cannot sustain credibility when organisational behaviour contradicts what the brand communicates. Again, she noted that, that challenge,  places a responsibility on marketers that extends beyond crafting persuasive messages.

Moreover, she said that, , rather than merely communicating claims, marketers should also question whether the organisation has enough evidence and substance behind those claims to justify putting them before the public.

She argued that the marketing function should therefore engage more deeply with the wider value chain and hold relevant stakeholders accountable for delivering the reality behind the communication.

Similarly, the Imperfectly Awesome Author explained that the  pressure has become even greater with the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence and synthetic content.

Bamigbaiye Elatuyi observed that content, once relatively scarce, can now be produced at enormous scale. AI can generate convincing images, while manufactured testimonials and other forms of synthetic content can create the appearance of authenticity.

Consequently, she said marketers must place greater emphasis on verification, evidence and accountability. The challenge, she maintained, is no longer simply getting consumers to see a message. It is enabling them to determine whether what they are seeing reflects reality.

She also cautioned brands against relying on temporary relevance to build lasting relationships with consumers. According to her, relevance needs to endure through consistent delivery, rather than disappear once a campaign ends.

That consistency, she explained, requires organisations to continue meeting their promises and ensuring that the people responsible for delivering those promises remain accountable.

Bamigbaiye Elatuyi subsequently proposed a practical test for marketers evaluating the credibility of a brand claim. In addition, she maintained that, the first question is whether the claim is actually true while the   second is whether the organisation can produce evidence when consumers or other stakeholders challenge it.

Again, she added that the third is whether consumers can experience the promise in reality.

As well, she disclosed that the  final consideration is whether the organisation can sustain that experience consistently after the campaign and its publicity have ended.

She maintained that marketers should not spend their energy defending clever wording when the underlying assertion cannot withstand scrutiny. Instead, they should establish whether the claim itself has sufficient evidence and consistency to justify the communication.

The same principle, she noted, applies to corporate governance, which is concerned with the evidence supporting organisational claims rather than simply the quality of a brand story.

Turning the discussion to ownership of credibility, Bamigbaiye Elatuyi rejected the idea that credibility belongs exclusively to the chief executive, marketing department or public relations agency.

She said every person and stakeholder connected to an organisation contributes to the credibility consumers eventually experience. “That makes organisational behaviour particularly important because consumers do not see the internal structures behind a brand. They encounter the combined outcome of the organisation’s actions, communications and customer experiences.”

During the interactive segment that followed, she also addressed the relationship between trust, truth and relevance. Rather than treating the three as isolated marketing objectives, she described them as interconnected elements of brand credibility.

“Trust determines whether consumers are prepared to believe a brand, truth concerns whether the brand actually delivers what it claims, while relevance determines whether that proposition continues to matter to the consumer.:

She stressed that marketers must protect all three because changes in consumer behaviour can alter what audiences consider important and meaningful. Her argument became particularly pointed when she turned to the Nigerian market and the pressure facing brands amid changing economic conditions.

Bamigbaiye Elatuyi questioned whether brands remain faithful to what they say they offer when manufacturers face difficult operating conditions and rising costs.

She referred to changes in product pricing and package sizes as issues that can affect consumer perceptions of whether a brand is maintaining its proposition.

While acknowledging that businesses operate under economic pressure, she argued that brands must be careful not to erode the proposition on which consumers built their trust.

For her, economic challenges do not remove the need for brands to remain truthful and consistent.

She pointed to established global brands as examples of organisations that have continued to maintain their core identities despite changes in economies and consumer behaviour across different markets.

Those brands, she argued, have retained the core propositions that helped consumers understand and trust them over time. Her presentation consequently placed credibility at the intersection of communication, organisational conduct and consumer experience.

For marketers, the message was clear: advertising can create awareness, but the longer journey towards credibility depends on what consumers can verify, experience and repeatedly observe from the brand.

The second session of the 2026 EDGE National Stakeholders’ Summit therefore moved the conversation beyond the question of how brands communicate their promises to a more fundamental consideration of whether their actions consistently give consumers reasons to believe those promises.