From Visibility to Trust and What Makes People Recommend You
Paula Andrade is the founder of El Brand, a cross-border marketing agency in Singapore. A marketing strategist and storyteller, she is known for connecting brands, building meaningful collaborations, and starting The Curious Circle, a curated event series for founders, creatives, curious minds, and decision-makers.
Getting noticed is one challenge. Becoming someone people trust enough to recommend is another. During the second series of The Curious Circle in Singapore, one question kept surfacing across conversations from technology, law, relocation, and entrepreneurship: what makes us comfortable putting our own reputation behind someone else?
What makes people trust a business?
For Series 2 of The Curious Circle, we gathered founders, professionals, and creatives around a theme: Seen, Trusted, Recommended.
The three words sound sequential. People see you, get to know you, trust you, and eventually recommend you. But as the evening unfolded, the conversations made one thing clear. Trust rarely develops in such a neat order.
Someone might have followed your work quietly for years before speaking to you. A client might trust you after one experience. Someone might recommend you after hearing your name repeatedly from people they already trust.
A business with thousands of followers might still struggle to earn any of those things. Visibility gives people the chance to find you. What they find after that matters far more.
Four different perspectives, one conversation about trust
One of the reasons I enjoy bringing people from different industries into The Curious Circle is that the same question starts producing completely different answers.
Pradnya Nikam of OmniGro Artificial Intelligence (AI) spoke about AI visibility and what machines consider when deciding which businesses and brands surface in recommendations.
Atty. Agnes Botor shared a perspective rooted in professional reputation, trust, and building something of your own.
Ruth Lockwood of Santa Fe Relocation brought another layer to the conversation: what happens to trust when people, businesses, and relationships move across countries and cultures.
Tam Nguyen of G.O.L Solution spoke about starting somewhere new and building credibility from the ground up.
On paper, these were different subjects. In the room, they kept connecting. Technology changes how we are found. Reputation influences whether people believe what they find. Experience gives them evidence. Relationships carry that trust into places advertising does not always reach.
Different industries. Similar questions. What have you done? Do your actions match what you say? What do other people say about you? Would someone feel comfortable recommending you?
Visibility is not the same as credibility
Marketing puts a lot of attention on visibility: more impressions, more followers, better search rankings, more mentions, and more traffic. These numbers matter.
But visibility alone does not tell us whether someone trusts a brand. Think about how you make recommendations yourself.
If a friend asks you for an accountant, restaurant, designer, or lawyer, you rarely recommend the first name you recognise. You think about your experience with them, what you have heard from others, and whether they delivered what they promised.
Perhaps, without consciously thinking about it, you also consider what recommending them says about you. That last part deserves more attention. A recommendation involves a small transfer of reputation.
When you tell someone, “Speak to her, she’s good,” you are putting a little bit of your own credibility behind that introduction.
Recognition asks: “Do I know this name?” Recommendation asks: “Am I comfortable putting my name beside theirs?” That is a much higher bar.
Trust is built when you are not in the room
This was one of the strongest thoughts I took away from the evening. We tend to think of brand building as the things we actively put into the world: our website, content, campaigns, events, and media coverage.
But a large part of our reputation develops somewhere else. It exists in the conversation between two former clients, in a review, in a WhatsApp group, or in what an employee tells a friend about working with you.
It exists in the person who sees someone asking for a recommendation and thinks of your name.
You are not present for most of these moments. You cannot script them either.
What you have control over is the body of evidence people draw from when those conversations happen. Did you do good work? Were you consistent? Did the experience match the promise? Did you make the relationship worth remembering?
Marketing helps shape expectations. Experience either supports or contradicts them.
The room started doing its own work
After the talks, something interesting happened. People stayed. Conversations moved around the tables. People from technology, law, relocation, education, hospitality, media, and entrepreneurship started finding connections between subjects that looked unrelated at first.
A conversation about AI visibility became a conversation about reputation. A discussion about moving across countries raised questions about how trust travels. Someone mentioned a business challenge, and another person immediately thought of someone they should meet.
There is also a small irony in me being the person who keeps gathering these rooms. I can be awkward. I overthink introductions. I sometimes leave a conversation and think of the better thing I should have said five minutes earlier.
Yet the will to gather people and see who might connect seems to win over the awkwardness. That night was a good reminder of why. The interesting part was not watching people collect contacts. It was watching people become curious about one another.
Not every conversation needed an immediate outcome. Some might lead nowhere. Another might become relevant six months later when someone remembers a name from the room.
That is where networking becomes more interesting to me. The question shifts from: “How many people did I meet?” to: “Did I learn enough about someone to know when they should come to mind?”
Being remembered requires something specific
If recommendation depends partly on memory, businesses need to give people something clear to remember. This is where branding becomes important. Ask someone what your company does. Would they know?
Ask what makes you different. Would they have an answer? Ask who they would refer you to. Would anyone specific come to mind?
A brand that tries to be everything becomes difficult to describe. Something difficult to describe is often difficult to recommend. People need a mental shortcut. “She’s the person I speak to about.” “They’re good at.” “You should meet them because.”
Clear positioning helps people complete those sentences. Your audience should not need to memorise your service deck before referring you. Give them something simple enough to carry into another room.
Give people evidence worth repeating
Trust does not come from saying “trust us.” It comes from accumulated evidence. For businesses, this means looking beyond promotional content. Show the work.
Share useful knowledge. Let customers talk about their experiences. Make your expertise visible. Keep your promises.
Be consistent in the small interactions people rarely consider marketing, and make sure what people find online supports what they hear offline. This matters even more as discovery changes.
A customer might first encounter your business through Google, LinkedIn, an AI recommendation, an article, an Instagram post, or a friend’s message.
Those paths look different, but they eventually lead to the same question: “Do I have enough reason to trust this?”
Perhaps you do not need everyone to know you
Businesses spend enormous energy trying to reach more people. Sometimes growth requires exactly that. But Series 2 left me thinking about another goal: be known well by the right people. Be known for something specific.
Give people enough evidence to trust what you say. Deliver an experience worth remembering. Make your work easy enough to describe that someone knows exactly when to bring your name into a conversation.
Because perhaps one of the strongest signs of a good brand is not what happens when you walk into a room. It is what people say about you when you are not there. That is the distance between being seen and being recommended. Much of the work happens somewhere in between.
Build a brand people feel good recommending
At El Brand, we work with businesses on branding, marketing, and visibility across markets, with a focus on making brands clearer, more relevant, and easier to understand.
The Curious Circle grew from a similar curiosity about how people, ideas, and opportunities find one another.
If there is one question worth taking from Series 2, perhaps it is this: If someone were asked to recommend a business like yours today, have you given them enough reason to say your name?
Read more from Paula Andrade
Paula Andrade, Founder & Marketing Director of El Brand
Paula Andrade is a marketing strategist, storyteller, and founder of El Brand, a cross-border marketing agency in Singapore. She writes about brand stories, marketing trends, cross-border marketing experiences, collaboration, and the people behind brands. Through her work, she explores how businesses grow with clearer narratives, stronger market understanding, and more meaningful connections. She is also the founder of The Curious Circle, a curated event series gathering founders, creatives, curious minds, and decision-makers.
