Trust, dogs and some marketing..

I am a marketer, and I rescue dogs. (They rescue me too!)

Over the past nine years, I came across more rescue cases than I could count, and somewhere along the way, I learned as much about marketing as I did about dogs.

It sounded like an odd pairing, but in my head, there was a thread that ran through both: marketing ran on trust, and the dogs I rescued taught me more about trust than anything else ever had.

If you spent enough time rescuing animals, you would learn things about trust that no marketing meeting could ever teach you - and I sat through years of meetings where we talked about trust like it was simple.

It never started with affection. It started with just showing up. Every day, I would leave food, step back, and wait — for days, sometimes weeks — before they could even approach the food knowing I was around. That made me realise I needed to be consistent with my actions. Trust meant safety, nothing else.

The only thing that worked was showing up again and again, asking for nothing in return.

Then the shift would begin, and I could move to the next step. One day, I put my hand out, and I could actually feel it happen — the skin under my hand, a slight twitch. A flinch. That was the dog telling me, without any words for it, I want to trust you, and I'm not sure I can.

What I did in that moment mattered more than anything that came after. If I pushed too soon or moved too fast, I lost whatever ground I had gained. If I stayed still and let it pass, something shifted.

I saw trust in hiding faces, in running paws, in twitching skin, and then, finally, in a wagging tail. That was when I learned I had to be patient. Trust was never won in one go — it was earned, slowly, and it depended entirely on the other one choosing to give it.

That brought me back to my own work. I had spent years in marketing, where everyone talked about trust constantly — build trust, be transparent, be authentic — words said so often, and followed through on so rarely, that they had nearly stopped meaning anything.

But I had learned, through my dogs, that trust was never something you could talk your way into. It was never a line on a landing page. It was built exactly the way I had built it with them — by what you actually did, over and over, when nobody was watching closely enough to give you credit for it.

Every brand had its own version of that flinch — the moment it asked something of someone who wasn't sure yet. Sign up. Buy now. Hand over your number, your card, your data. So much of marketing was built around getting past that hesitation as fast as possible — urgency, countdowns, fear of missing out, anything to stop someone from pulling back.

I didn't think that was right. The hesitation wasn't something to push through. It was information. How you handled it decided whether you ended up with trust, or just a sale from someone who already half regretted it.

And here was the part most people missed. The day a dog finally trusted me wasn't the end of anything — it was the start of a responsibility. I was now holding something that had taken months to build, and that one wrong move could undo. Trust didn't just sit there once I had earned it. I had to keep earning it, every day, or it left — and it never came back as easily as it left.

I watched brands burn years of trust in a single dishonest moment and then act surprised that people didn't just forgive them and move on. People didn't work that way. Dogs definitely didn't.

I never explained it better than my dogs already had — eyes that finally came up off the ground, a body that stopped flinching, a dog that ran towards me instead of away. None of it was ever faked or rushed. It was earned, the same ordinary way, every single day.

That remains the only kind of trust I believe in. And the lesson I carried into my work, and everywhere else, was the one my dogs had taught me: Be patient. Be consistent. Be real.