According the most recent Gallup numbers I could find, American businesses rank about equally with Congress in trust, well below the church, schools, and the military (the most trusted of all).

Those aren’t very good numbers.  Corporate communications has a job to do – to tell the positive story of business in American civic life.  And it’s not doing it very well, as the numbers show.

To be sure, we live in an angry era, and suspicion of all institutions is high, but the military ranks very high, and its main job is to kill people.

We live in an angry era.

But that’s a starting point, not an excuse.  It suggests two story lines that businesses can adopt, in order to point the way forward, increase the positive feelings consumers have for business, and push those poll numbers up.

The old story line that I took in as a boy, unthinkingly, was all about loyalty.  I would grow up, keep my nose clean, and work for one company the rest of my working days, uncomplaining and indeed cheerful in my obedience to my distant corporate overlords.  In exchange, the company would give me a secure berth, and a decent retirement.

I never even had a chance to try that story out; the Vietnam War intervened, it turned out that companies made Napalm, and bombs, and participated in a war effort that I couldn’t see the point of.  So that story line went the way of The Man, President Johnson the Warmonger, and the Swinging Sixties, which I was just too young to enjoy.

Eventually, a new story line began to emerge, or re-occupy the spotlight.  It was the innovation story.  Companies were hard at work bringing a never-ending supply of cool new toys into my life, making it better, whether it was a smart phone or an iPad or a Bluetooth speaker.  The future I had occasionally seen as a boy, when I was permitted to watch Star Trek, was coming true, gadget by gadget.

But that story has run its course and we need a new one.  We’re getting a little suspicious of gadgets – those phones may actually isolate us, and cause us to become depressed, not to mention the environmental cost of all that stuff and the packaging it came in.

Two possibilities are out there, waiting for a smart company to pick them up and run with them.  First, there’s the story of the product or service that will help us cope with change.  This is a Stranger in a Strange Land story, as I’ve talked about many times before, here and here and here.  But it’s particularly apt right now because of our sense as a society that we’re overloaded, falling behind, and missing out on too much information because we can’t keep up with it all.

How to tell that story?  Begin with the confusion I’m experiencing, overloaded and running faster and faster just to keep up, and then show me a way to cope better than I have before.  But don’t drown me in features of your product or service, because I’m already overloaded.  Make it simple for me.

A fun example of a product that naturally fits this story line is the Google near -simultaneous translator.  And it has the added benefit of originating in Star Trek.

I want one; one that works really, really well.  I travel a lot, and being able to understand most of the languages I come across would be a fabulous simplification of my life.  I’d feel a little less strange in all the strange lands I find myself in.

The second story line is the product or service that will restore order to my existence.  This is a Revenge story, as I’ve talked about here and here and here.  Revenge stories are all about spotting injustice or disorder and taking me on the journey to a restoration of order.  Make me great again, as a certain campaign slogan had it, and I’m in.

A very minor example of this story is the Honey plug in (if that’s what they’re called) that you can add to your browser, that automatically scans for coupons and price reductions so that when you go to buy something on line you can be sure you’ve got the lowest price.  In a small way, order is restored, justice is being done, and I’m not getting screwed by some vendor out there because I’m in too much of a hurry to do much comparison shopping.

Two products, two stories, two ways for businesses to begin to create a different relationship with consumers and bring those dismal poll numbers up.