Gal Borenstein, creator of the GUARDIAN Digital Trust Framework, reveals how brands can build resilience in the age of misinformation. With $800 billion in e-commerce influenced by fake reviews and deepfakes threatening credibility, learn practical strategies for establishing transparency and fostering authentic trust.
When 4% of online reviews are fake but influence $800 billion in e-commerce, we’re not dealing with a marginal issue. We’re dealing with a systematic distortion of reality that’s changing the competitive landscape for every brand.
In our latest episode, I sat down with Gal Borenstein, Founder and CEO of The Borenstein Group and creator of the GUARDIAN Digital Trust Framework, to discuss how marketing leaders can navigate the misinformation age and build genuine trust with both customers and employees.
Gal shared something his father, Haim Borenstein, used to say: “Trust, once earned, is priceless.” That statement is still true, but the path to earning trust has fundamentally changed.
In the analog era, trust accumulated slowly through reputation, relationships, and consistency. Today, trust is manufactured, manipulated, and often weaponized. The uncomfortable reality? U.S. businesses can see revenue increases of up to 9% by manipulating reviews. Companies that play by the rules are often penalized for their integrity.
But here’s what Gal emphasized: this doesn’t excuse abandoning ethics. It raises the bar for leadership.
Every credible executive trust strategy must do three things:
1. Build Trust
This starts with transparency—not performative transparency, but operational transparency. How decisions are made. How data is used. How mistakes are acknowledged. Real transparency, not marketing copy.
2. Protect Trust
Trust is now an asset under constant attack. Leaders must ensure accountability, internally and externally. That means governance, clear ownership, and consequences when trust is compromised. You can’t just build trust and hope it holds.
3. Measure Trust
What you don’t measure, you don’t manage. Leaders must invest in verification—not just metrics like sentiment or engagement, but verification mechanisms that validate authenticity, identity, and integrity across digital touchpoints.
As Gal put it: “Trust is no longer a soft concept. It is infrastructure.”
The GUARDIAN Digital Trust Framework was born from a simple realization: most companies treat trust as a byproduct. Gal believes trust must be designed.
By humanizing technology, maintaining radical clarity, and fostering genuine two-way accountability, leaders can build organizations that are resilient under pressure and credible under scrutiny. Trust is not what you say. It’s what holds when systems fail, when narratives break, and when scrutiny increases.
With 5% of Glassdoor reviews being fake, leaders must stop outsourcing trust to platforms. Authentic workplace trust is built internally before it’s ever reflected externally.
That means:
Transparency platforms are mirrors, not foundations. If the culture is broken, the reflection will be distorted or gamed. Trust starts inside the organization, long before it’s posted online.
The era of persuasion-first marketing is over.
Modern trust-centric marketing must focus on:
Credibility now outperforms cleverness. Consistency outperforms campaigns. Marketing is no longer about telling a story—it’s about withstanding verification.
For marketing leaders ready to implement this framework, Gal’s advice is clear: Audit your trust gaps before you amplify your message.
Before spending another dollar on marketing, ask:
Digital trust equity compounds, but only if the foundation is real.
Trust is no longer something you earn once and protect passively. It’s something you build deliberately, defend continuously, and prove daily. That’s the shift leaders must make in the misinformation age.
Kelly Callahan-Poe: In the age of AI, deep fakes and fake news where authenticity can be gamed, listen in to learn how executives can keep their brand resilient. Welcome to the Two Marketing Moms podcast. I’m Kelly Callahan-Poe and today’s episode is called Trust on Life Support, How to Lead in the Misinformation Age with Gal Borenstein. Gal is founder and CEO of the Borenstein Group, a Washington DC based strategic marketing firm with nearly 30 years of experience in high-tech branding, he’s a leading voice on digital trust and AI-driven marketing. He’s the author of multiple business books, including the book, Don’t Believe the Hype, which I have read from cover to cover, and the creator of the Guardian Digital Trust Framework. Welcome, Gal.
Gal Borenstein: Thank you for having me on your program.
Kelly: In the beginning of your book, you mentioned a quote from your father, which I loved, who said, trust once earned is priceless. But in the era of AI, has the nature of earning trust fundamentally changed?
Gal: Absolutely. I think the age of AI really has challenged all of us to rethink the concept of what is trust and what can be trusted. And the bottom line is nothing can be trusted anymore because we took out the single most important element in trust, which is the human element, the ability to have conversations between people and seeing if they have an agenda or not. So most people now have their guards up, if you will, and some people have their guards down and both teams are losing. So it’s a fascinating development that really came out of COVID where we used to talk to each other in a cafe, a trade show, in any kind of business activity involving a handshake at some point, possibly an email. But the video conferencing and the whole idea that you can communicate without needing to meet somebody in person created a fake universe. And AI is now offering us better tools to fake our presence, to create fake personality, fake content, fake promises. And the only thing that is holding us together is that we are getting aware of how to deal with it until the next bomb drops.
Kelly: Well, let’s dig into trust because you have written a book about this topic. What are the three things that companies need to do to craft their executive trust strategies?
Gal: Well, the three things that I typically kind of recommend and it’s kind of in the book in more detail, it’s number one is acknowledge that you have a trust problem. The second is to create a benchmark and a system that allows you to create something that everybody can hold the feet of the fire, if you will. And third is make sure that you’re connecting the entire ecosystem, which includes the employees, which includes your product manufacturers, your suppliers, your former employees, anybody who’s involved in communication internally and externally need to be part of that system. And I know it’s not easy when you hear that. How do you do that? But it is possible and it’s working in companies where management and leadership take accountability and responsibility for understanding that they don’t control the narrative anymore. The market controls the narrative. You got social media, you got fake reviews, good reviews, HR departments that are asking their employees or pressuring them into writing nice reviews about their company. Former employees that are taking revenge on the company by putting bad information on social media where somebody can go on TikTok and completely destroy your brand in 15 seconds and there’s no accountability for it. So what’s really kind of the fundamental of trust and the foundation that I just talked about is that the biggest problem is number one, acknowledging it. And it’s very hard for CEOs, especially those I’ve interviewed for the book and worked with over the last 30 years in different sizes, small, mid-size, very large companies. They’re all humans and they all have some form of insecurity that if they ask a question that they may not know the answer to anymore, that’s going to basically compromise them or put them in a position of vulnerability that doesn’t work. And I tell them as part of the system approach that if you’re not willing to be vulnerable, you basically are not going to survive in the age where everything is transparent, no matter what you do. So you might as well own the narrative and create something that you can gather people around and make sure that that value stays.
Kelly: Plus being vulnerable is being human, right?
Gal: Of course, but as we all know, especially in the business world, we’ve been trained to keep our real self hidden unless it has a business transactional interest. When you get promoted, when you say happy birthday to somebody at work, sometimes it’s because you’re a great person and sometimes it’s because you might get promoted and you want to make sure that there is a good relationship with the supervisor that might promote you. So there’s a lot of nuances that come from the old school. But what is changing the transparency paradigm, especially, is the idea that you can’t own it on your own. And you have to bring in people to the fold. And most executives have a tough time doing that because they truly believe that if they let a secret out, that will destroy them as opposed to what’s really happening, which is you got a secret, I don’t trust you.
Kelly: You’ve developed something called the Guardian Digital Trust Framework. Can you kind of walk us through the inspiration for the framework and kind of real broad strokes what it involves?
Gal: Sure. So the concept for the Guardian came as it was kind of trying to think of the framework that will be able to kind of communicate to everyone in an organization, whether you’re at the CHRO, whether you’re the CFO, the CEO, and think about companies that just have a president and a vice president. They don’t have that many C-suite people, but they have directors of operations in different positions, and it started by asking the question, what are the things that really kind of are fundamentals that you got to have? And the short version of it is number one, you have to have that transparency for good news and for bad news. The second is you have to have collaboration. That is really based on sharing information and then tackling problems together, because when people kind of hide, like I mentioned before, part of the problem or part of the solution, other people suspect them. So fixing it and putting it into a system. And then the third one, which is connecting those people with an ethos that everyone can believe in and then parlaying that to the employees of the company and getting their buy-in. That is really kind of how trust breaks or trust thrives. So in many ways, the Guardian, which I called Guardian because I felt like we need protection from lies and from fake news and fake reviews. And it’s really about guarding trust and creating transparency so people can actually participate in it and never hurt a company to do that.
It only hurts a company to have secrets because when you say the word secret, you already have a negative connotation in the business world. To give you a very quick example that most people are just—I was really surprised when I talked about the case study that I won’t mention the situation or the client specifically, but where they had to fire about 500 people in one day.
They knew about it four weeks before because of financial performance, but the CFO and the CEO knew about it, but the rest of the organization did not. So the result of that was that the people that were not part of that cone of silence, if you will, wound up being very upset because they felt they were cheated by their CEO. They’re cheated by their CFO.
Worst, they basically had to fire people without giving them an answer why they’re being fired or downsized or right-sized or a riff. Whatever the word that people use, which is, in my mind, a joke when people say we’re letting you go. You’re not letting anybody go. You’re firing them for performance or there is a downsizing or there’s a monetary event.
And well, nobody likes it. It’s part of the process of communicating. So the experience that I had with that particular client was that they didn’t trust their own executives to carry the message and develop it and ask them to parlay to the next level of management. So the entire management team is ready for employees that were on that list to be called and to have a narrative that is not only transparent, but also believable because they actually shared it with something that was called an employee council, where people actually liked the idea of having an open door with a CEO. But instead, what was happening was that hundreds of employees were just circling around the rumor mill and that company’s brand was completely decimated to a point where vendors, suppliers weren’t sure if they wanted to work with this company because it was really kind of destroying the brand reputation of the company. And the company couldn’t do anything because they didn’t think through the process of how to communicate in a crisis environment and the fact that every manager or executive in that environment has a responsibility. The CFO has a responsibility to communicate numbers, but the CEO has the responsibility for the entire organization. But there’s also something that’s called corporate culture, values, and the ethos of the company.
How do you communicate to somebody who’s lost hope in three seconds because they had a mortgage to pay and now you’re telling them you have two weeks severance or no severance at all and you have to deal with the real world, not acknowledging it, for example, which is very easy to do and asking them to have the capacity to think about maybe we can hire you in a different position, offering them a transition plan out, all these things didn’t happen. And that’s what kills companies in the digital world. And AI is just perpetuating it because everything happens now in seconds. So a crisis that used to be something that rolled over weeks until maybe a local newspaper picked it up, is now happening in real time.
And if you’re a competitor, you pounce on it and you make sure that the other side looks really bad. This is not the right way of doing it, but that’s reality that we have to deal with. So that’s why the Guardian framework starts by saying we really need a trust index. We don’t know what the answers are. We don’t know what we trust and what we don’t. But let’s put it on paper. Let’s put it on a big whiteboard and narrow down to the things we care about the most. So in a good company, the corporate culture is extremely important, whether it’s for innovation, whether it’s for best quality, whatever it may be, if that’s kind of your heart and that’s kind of what you’re continuously striving to have, this is the opportunity to do it by putting it on the board and saying, so how do we take that word like excellence or innovation or best in breed, whatever we want to call it. Who needs to trust that statement? Of course, the external customers and prospects have to, but who else in the organization? And typically what people miss is operations. Actually, the people that are actually making the product or making the service work, and they leave them out because they’re not as important for some reason.
And that is the killer because imagine that you’re saying you’re the best. You have the highest quality product in the marketplace and operations and manufacturing, for example, if it was an industrial company, wouldn’t know about all the complaints. And then we build the whole campaign from an advertising point of view for that company based on that statement that that is the best quality and then you get the whole world exploding with comments that this is really a joke or this company is a joke. So we need to take that very seriously and then build your own trust DNA. It doesn’t have to be everything in the world. And then apply to the ideas of transparency. Who needs to be collaborating when things can go better and when there’s a crisis situation? And then accountability, which has to do with the idea that every one of us in an executive management position in the company is accountable to another person. The CEO is accountable not only to the shareholders or the investors or the bankers or just to the company itself. The CEO is the leader that should lead what really counts for the company to keep its cultural values and its ethos in place.
When I say ethos and the reason I use that word very often is that I’ve interviewed a lot of CEOs that actually were national board leaders and came out of the military. And to be a leader in the military, you can make a leader, a leader that can be trained with skills, but you can make it up. And then CEOs are pretty much the same. There’s some CEOs that are introverts, some that are very kind of upfront. And if they’re not really kind of understanding the importance of being connected to their own management team, and they’re basically operating in their own universe, what happens in reality is that you have a brand for the CEO, you have a brand for the operations, you have a brand for the culture of the company. And if they’re not aligned, you lose.
Kelly: Well, employees are obviously a key component as well. And one of the stats that you provided, which surprised me in a different way than you would think, is your research shows that about 5% of Glassdoor reviews are fake. I actually thought the number would be much higher.
Gal: It is much higher. The source that I used, it’s kind of an institute of research that does it globally. So globally, it’s 5%. In the US, it’s closer to 15 to 20%. And that applies to most review sites, including ones that we think are very reputable. Because nobody can tell what’s right and what’s fake.
Kelly: That makes more sense.
Gal: And since it’s anonymous and you can be anybody that you want to be. And that’s very scary and very kind of impactful when you think about a company’s reputation in this age that we live in.
Kelly: So how are leaders supposed to address this when even these transparency platforms can be manipulated?
Gal: The first thing that I advise all CEOs and all leaders that are asking that question is, do you have a dashboard? Do you have a sentiment dashboard that basically shows you what the market is doing? Not the social media sentiment tool that tells you kind of what’s positive and what’s negative, but just the way you have a dashboard for your finances in the company.
When you invite the CFO, you ask him, are we over, are we under, are we doing well, are we behind, do we have a backlog? Whatever the questions are for the CFO, the CEO and the executive management team, after you develop the trust index and you know what are the things that matter to your company, is applying it to now the idea that you need to have a dashboard that follows what’s going on in the real world that is not just the industrial trends, if you will, if you’re a shoemaker or manufacturer or HVAC, it doesn’t matter what the company may do. But if there are more negative reviews in a certain period of time, you need to know when it’s happening. And with all the technologies that are available now, including AI and digital tracking, you can have the same information that a command control center in the Pentagon has. If you put the screens with the right information in front of you and acknowledge that profitability is as important as having a trust screen and all the other business KPIs that we’re used to. So trust needs to become a KPI that is reviewed and continuously improved. But you always have your finger on the pulse. Don’t wait for a communication report from your very talented communication department because that’s not their job. Their job is to keep communicating and to create creative ways of presenting the company. And if you’re in response mode, you’re already losing.
Kelly: So my marketing brain is firing on all cylinders to think about how this is going to impact how we market and communicate to consumers. I would assume that gives marketers much more opportunities to look at testimonials, real stories. So tell me a little bit about how you think the current environment should change to adapt to this era of fleeting trust.
Gal: Yes. I think that a lot of old school techniques that we kind of dropped over the years as managers and management in corporate America especially is analog trust. And analog trust goes back to the fact that, okay, COVID is over. Now we have to be in the office in most cities for three days a week and you have opportunities to also interact with customers. And you can interact with customers, for example, by renewing some of those face-to-face interactions. You can create surveys about the values that you stand for and see how they rank you. Because if you can go to your customer, and I’m talking about customers that have been with you, which I always refer to as friends and family customers. There’s always an 80-20 in every service industry. And in most product companies in the factory, it might be proliferated into 20/20, 20/20. But the bottom line is if you don’t have the intimacy with your friends and family customers and say, I think we are known for high quality and I think we’re at an eight and then the customer feedback is I think you’re at a three and you don’t do anything about it. You don’t fix your communications. You don’t have new quality control or quality assurance programs. You’re not being responsive. Conversely, if you are listening and say, thank you for giving me a three, I did not know that that was going on, but we’re going to fix it because that’s one of our most important values. And it happened because of a multitude of reasons that could be supply chain, could be the price of steel going up, whatever that may be, by being authentic and actually saying, we’ve got a problem, we’re gonna fix it, and we’re gonna use everything in our power to do it in a way that is not just based on false promises, which is, I hear you, we’ll call you back in three months. I think that’s the heart of it. And I think also using customer testimonials, case studies are making a huge comeback because we don’t believe anything else. And yes, we’re very suspicious when we see a case study on a website of a company, but at least we know that there was an effort and an attempt to communicate versus the old narrative, which was essentially, we are who we are. We’re the best in what we do.
And that was a one-sided narrative. Now people will call you out on it and they should. But at the same time, I think somebody very smart once said it takes a lifetime to build a reputation and it takes a few seconds to ruin it. I think it was Warren Buffett that actually said that.
And it very much applies to what we’re dealing with right now in marketing and branding and business management in most companies. So again, a lot of authenticity. Get your employees to be part of a feedback loop, not just when they’re being promoted or getting kudos on what they’re doing, but ask them, what can we do better?
And if we need to do it better, what does it take? And in the old world, just before where we are now, the answer is, you need more employees. You need more systems. We’re not going to do that. We don’t have the money for it. Instead of listening and realizing and doing competitive research that shows that your closest competitor is going to be much bigger than you in a year because they have done it already or they’re actually in the process of doing it now.
So it’s about really kind of bringing a conversation together. But if you don’t trust that conversation, because the person that is telling you, we’re going to do it or we don’t do it, is not trustworthy, because they haven’t shown it, that’s where the rubber meets the road. And then that car doesn’t go anywhere other than to the ditch.
Kelly: For a marketing leader who wants to implement your framework, what’s the single most important step to start building their digital trust equity?
Gal: The most important part is, like I said at the beginning, talking about acknowledgement and then building a trust index, which essentially is take your company values, take your corporate culture values, take the promises that you make, which you have all that information already and put it in a dashboard and put it in a numerical and quantitative manner. It’s never going to be math in science, but if you put it in writing and suddenly you see it from zero to 10 that you’re at three in one area and you’re an eight in another one, it could be an asset. The three could be an asset and the eight could be a liability because you’re doing something so well that you’re going to go out of business because nobody else wants to do it anymore. And the third is actually the opportunity. So I advise CEOs and any kind of executives and managers is to build that trust index from zero to 10. Put it on 10 lines with 10 values and ask yourself number one in that group, where are we now? Make sure that that is a continuous feedback loop and then make sure that all key elements in the company are participating in that dialogue and giving them opportunities to share their perspective. If you’re on the factory floor, you have a very specific perspective on whether you’re getting good benefits or not. And in the past, you couldn’t say anything, but now you can trust your employer and say, they promised us these benefits. And in fact, they don’t pay it at all. They just recruit that way. That can ruin a reputation. So paying attention to the people that kind of got with you in the elevator at the beginning and then rode with you to a successful position. They all need to be part of it. And from there, it’s really applying, how can we do better? How can we trust each other? What don’t we trust about each other and why? And then from there, it takes off because you realize, no, you can’t do all 10 things on that trust index that we’re talking about, but you can select the ones that are the most important that are connected to the profitability of the company. And by the way, the profitability of the company depends on what? Depends on its reputation in the marketplace. People buy something that they can trust. Think about the most mundane example of Mercedes or BMW or Audi. Why do people pay 30, 40 percent more for any of those luxury brands, because they’ve shown through engineering and through studies for many, many years that they’re 10 years ahead of everyone else. So even in my car, I had Apple CarPlay almost 10 years ago when there was no discussion about it in the rest of the automotive industry. So it wasn’t because I was a genius as a buyer, it was that I trusted that when I drive a Mercedes, I will get the best and the 10 years ahead technologies, as in what the electric cars are doing now and the driverless cars are going to be later.
Kelly: Well, thank you for sharing your insights today, Gal. We’ll provide links to the book in the transcript as well as your contact information. And you can listen or watch the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or twomarketingmoms.com. And please don’t forget to subscribe and share. Thanks for joining.
