When a business enters a market and finds that people aren’t adopting the product the way they expected, the first diagnosis is usually demand.
“The market isn’t ready.”
“The customer isn’t educated enough.”
“The infrastructure isn’t there yet.”
The diagnosis is almost always wrong in an emergent market. It is especially confounding in high population ones where needs are plentiful and diverse.
But in these markets, formal institutions repeatedly fail people — banks exclude them, systems don’t see them, services overcharge and underdeliver — even so, trust doesn’t disappear. It can’t. Because the foundation of any market is trust. It finds other routes. It moves into relationships, communities, and informal networks that earn it through sustained reliability - even if imperfect - rather than through official designation. The consistency, availability and proximity matter more than excellence.
The trader who extends credit to a regular customer isn’t operating in a low-trust environment. She is operating in a high-trust network that formal institutions struggle to replicate or even see. She is the trust infrastructure. The referral that brings a new customer to a her isn’t just a marketing channel. It carries a marketing message pre-loaded with trust. That trust is based on the accumulated confidence of one person extended to the next customer.
What formal systems read as low trust is often something more specific: low trust in formal systems. The trust itself is plentiful. It simply doesn’t flow through the channels the business built for it.
This distinction changes everything about how builders should build products, go-to-market, and partnerships. If trust is absent, you create it. If trust is routed differently, you find where it already flows — and build your product at that junction.
Most businesses that fail in these markets were looking for trust in the wrong place. It was always there. They just weren’t standing where it moved.
Where does trust move in your market — and are you building at that junction, or waiting for the customer to come to you?
These reflections sit alongside a longer body of work in progress — The Emergent Economy — which explores how markets form before institutions notice them.
This is somewhat a charge to founders/operators to be ok with the uniqueness of building in an emergent economy. So good, thank youu Adia.
Love the closing question - Where does trust move in your market — and are you building at that junction, or waiting for the customer to come to you?