In today’s hyper-connected, hyper-personalized, yet increasingly siloed environment, brands are clamoring for more than just your attention. They’re trying to gain your trust.
Edelman’s 2025 Trust Barometer on brand trust cited how 80% of people trust the brands they buy and use, especially if they reflect the same values or support the same causes. In today’s unpredictable climate, the report says consumers also look towards these brands for “economic hope and personal stability” — that is, a sense of familiarity, safety, and even confidence or inspiration. Brands that tout well-communicated optimism, education, and a sense of deep community get more of an audience’s vote of confidence. The same report states that 88% even view trustworthiness to be just as important as price or quality!
So let’s dive right into the question you’re likely asking.
How Do You Get Consumers to Trust Your Brand?
Great PR is more critical to cultivating brand trust in 2026 than it has ever been. These days, though, it’s not just about getting a press release in The Philippine Star or Inquirer (though that is a huge slice of the PR pie).
Modern PR in the Philippines is about:
- Building and protecting trust,
- Fostering genuine community and showing care amid uncertainty, and;
- Crafting integrated, compelling narratives that cut through the digital noise.
Related: How to Build Trust in Your Brand During Uncertainty
So whether you’re a multinational giant or a bootstrapping local startup, you cannot afford to ignore the power of great public relations in 2026.
Now more than ever, your people need to hear your voice.
Here’s how to cultivate brand trust through great PR.
- Understand that the Philippines is a Trust-Based Country
Filipinos are inherently relational. We place immense value on tiwala (trust).
Because of this, you have to be aware of how your brand is perceived. A brand that can authentically prove its trustworthiness has a massive competitive advantage.
This can mean:
- Cementing your place as an expert (i.e. a skincare brand posting blogs about skincare and health)
- Dealing with misinformation
- Creating authentic relationships with your audience through thoughtful, situation-sensitive communication
PR is the strategic function that builds that foundation of trust, not just through advertising, but through actions, sincere relationships, and third-party endorsements.
- Prioritize Storytelling
Over the years, we’ve made strong cases for the importance of frontloading storytelling as your strategy.
Even in the age of AI-generated informative videos, social media vertical dramas (short stories that usually follow a generic, AI-generated script published as multiple short, second-long reels for easier consumption), and AI-assisted advertisements, storytelling remains the underbelly of relevant, trust-cultivating content and strategy.
Media intelligence platform Cision recently published “Inside PR 2026”, essentially a report on the future of comms. The piece highlighted one strong trend – that despite rapid integration of AI across PR activities, the most in-demand skill (59%) is still human-reliant: storytelling. According to UserCentrics, AI cannot yet replicate true, resonant storytelling. Even in this AI-optimistic article, Ernst and Young Limited acknowledged AI content fatigue. In short, people are growing tired of AI content. We’re not getting tired of telling stories, though.
So while AI is still controversial within many industries in the Philippines, at the end of the day, your brand still gets to decide whether or not AI should be part of your strategy. Whether you do or don’t, prioritize humanized, authentic stories to drive your core messages home. Good PR helps you cut through the sea of generic, AI-produced marketing copies, and having a PR agency partner can help you discover the best stories that even AI could never come up with.
(Good to note: The Cision report also stated that, after storytelling, in-demand skills also include media relations, strategic planning, and data analysis to inform decision-making. You need a PR partner with the expertise in these realms to make sure your campaigns run smoothly.)
- Battle Disinformation with a Strong Ally
The spread of fake news is a persistent problem in the Philippines, and through our 30+ years of work, we’ve seen how great PR can help combat disinformation. Without getting into specifics, solid PR strategies have helped legacy transportation companies see another day on the road, and have helped pharmaceuticals communicate life-saving treatments for mild to moderate COVID-19 cases.
Whatever the industry, a great PR strategy, backed by a stellar PR team, is your first line of defense to proactively monitor your business’ landscape and swiftly, correctly react to neutralize reputational threats. A robust PR strategy includes an “always-on” crisis management and misinformation defense – and in this economy, you will be happy to have that at the ready.
- Diversify Your Media
Back then, “mass media” was radios, newspapers, bulletin boards, magazines, and the occasional networking event.
Today, audiences still have those, but also consume content across dozens of specialized platforms:
- Specialized TikTok communities,
- Substack newsletters,
- Niche podcasts,
- Hyper-local community groups, and
- Regional media outlets.
Great PR is about understanding this fractured landscape and crafting bespoke messages that resonate with specific communities, rather than trying a “one-size-fits-all” approach. A great PR partner can help you navigate all the media channels that can help your brand build trust.
- Involve Influencers in Your PR Plan
More specifically, more niche influencers are gaining community traction.
We’ve written about how nano and micro-influencers tend to have more tangible success because of how authentic their content leans, and about How Influencer Partnerships Shape Brand Perception.
In a nutshell, micro and nano influencers tend to:
- Deliver higher engagements rates
- Have successful conversion rates
- Form deeper bonds of trust with consumers in general (i.e. it’s easier to look to them for relatable, familiar content that audiences will seek out amid the global tumult)
- Create niche communities brands can tap into
The era of the massive celebrity influencer is still there, but is slowly sharing the space with smaller but no less impactful voices.
What your brand needs to take note of, regardless of your influencer strategy within your PR net, is that Filipino consumers, especially Gen Z and Gen Alpha, are savvy. They can spot inauthentic sponsorships from a mile away. They are turning to smaller, niche-focused micro-influencers (many based outside of Metro Manila) who have genuine authority in their communities.
A good PR strategy is crucial for identifying, vetting, and managing these nuanced relationships, ensuring partnerships are based on real, trustworthy value and not just vanity metrics.
- Build a Community
What better way to build trust than by gathering people who can advocate for your brand and what it stands for? The occasional crab aside, Filipinos love talking about and uplifting the people and even products they trust.
PR – public relations, after all! – is the vehicle for relating to your public and demonstrating your brand’s commitment to your community, country, and people. It’s not just about checking off the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) box; it’s about strategically communicating how your brand solves real-world problems your consumers face. Great PR is geared to then discover those stories within your community, and tell them authentically for the cycle to continue.
- Don’t Skip Out on SEO
Part of trust-building is visibility. In PR, visibility can be achieved through integrated owned, earned, and paid media strategies such as:
- Being published or featured in reputable media,
- Consistently posting value-adding, educational, and even feel-good content, and;
- Selecting strategic ads that boost awareness and credibility.
SEO, as a part of your owned media mix, is one very good visibility vehicle. If you want to rank for your key terms, you need high-quality reputable websites talking about and linking back to you. This is best achieved through great storytelling and media relations that get your brand mentioned by credible sources. A great PR strategy will include SEO, as you’ll want to optimize for authentic, trust–building content.
- Invest in People-Centric Thought Leadership
The narrative of the founder is now inseparable from the brand and how consumers trust it. Forbes, in a 2024 article, cited a PwC survey that showed 77% of consumers were more likely to purchase from a brand if the founder had an up-to-date social media presence. Now more than ever, people are looking towards the humanization of organizations with company leaders as the voice. PR’s role is to help amplify that voice.
It’s not enough that your thought leaders know how to talk. It starts with media training and knowing campaign key messages by heart, but thought leadership becomes more effective for trust-building when your brand voices can articulate how their audience’s problem matters to them so much they dedicate an entire enterprise to solving it.
This matters a lot for Filipino small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and startups in particular. With how our culture values human connection, customers want to buy from people they respect, that represent brands they trust. Great PR strategically crafts and manages this critical asset.
- Ramp Up Your Crisis Response
With social media, a single customer complaint or a misunderstood marketing post can escalate into a full-blown crisis in a matter of minutes, knocking down any trust you’ve built along the way. Build your crisis response muscle before you need it. Have a comprehensive crisis management plan at the ready. Be proactive, predictive, and prepared. That can manifest in real life as, say, a living document of pre-approved, authentic response templates and protocols ready to deploy instantly vis a vis pre-assessed risks your industry might face.
Great PR reminds you to have a crisis PR plan that has been simulated and optimized.
- Integrate Your PR
PR today has become an integrated function, connecting your traditional media executions with digital and content marketing, social media management, customer experience, executive communications, and beyond.
Great PR breaks down these old silos to make sure that you present a unified and powerful brand story that’s worth putting trust into.
A great PR agency partner will also help you determine which channels work best for your campaign, which messages should be amplified per channel, and ensure everything is connected and integrated seamlessly across platforms.
You can check your potential PR campaign values with our NGP ROI Calculator.
PR is Imperative Today, Tomorrow, and Beyond
Do you still need PR in 2026? Yes.
Is there more to PR than just inviting influencers and sending out PR packages? Yes.
Can you still see great PR results if you’re just starting your campaign now? Yes, yes, yes!
Great PR is all about telling the authentic stories that live within your business, sharing them with the audiences who will find value in it, and connecting that message through integrated channels for more people to discover. Telling, Sharing, Connecting – that’s how you build trust.
And in 2026, the brands that succeed will not be the ones that spend the most on ads or have the cleverest algorithms. They will be the brands that are the most trusted, the most connected to their communities, and the ones that tell the best stories.
Need PR for your brand? Reach out to NGP IMC here, or book an appointment here.
Kriztin Cruz is a recruitment and digital marketing professional, freelance writer, hobbyist painter, and frustrated sociologist–with too many things to want and too little time to spare. She graduated with a Psychology degree in 2019 at De La Salle – College of Saint Benilde Antipolo. When she’s not drafting a corporate letter or working on anything digital marketing, you can find her doing the following, but not in this order: reading a good book, scavenging for a good book, sketching, painting, journaling, junk journaling, obsessing over an obscure Czechoslovakian surrealist film (or anything by Miyazaki or Del Toro), cooking, finding a cafe to relax in, and creating new things while a nice documentary plays in the background.