We spend a lot of time in two kinds of rooms.
In the first, big institutions are figuring out how to reach communities they don’t live in. The data is impressive: age, income, ZIP code, language preference, media habits. The Hispanic Heritage Month plan is often already locked.
In the second, we’re talking with the people doing the work on the ground: community organizations, churches, local business owners, and others who have spent years building relationships in the communities they serve. They know who families call when something goes wrong, who helped them read the fine print, and which institutions they quietly stopped trusting.
Those two rooms don’t always talk to each other. And when they don’t, marketers can end up planning against the wrong competitor.
Take banking. Most banks think they’re competing with other banks for trust. From what we’ve seen, the real competition is often a nonprofit that helped someone buy their first home, a pastor who walked a family through their first budget, a community leader who answered a question no bank had thought to answer, or a tía or comadre who’s been in the U.S. for 20 years and knows how things work.
No campaign outspends that kind of trust. But you can learn from it.
That’s the part of cultural intelligence that often gets missed. Understanding your customer isn’t only about knowing their demographics or preferences. It’s understanding the relationships and institutions around them that shape how they make decisions.
Trust isn’t one thing
We’ve written about why there is no single Latino customer. This is what comes next: understanding how trust actually works once you stop treating people as a segment.
Financial Health Network research offers a useful example. In its 2025 survey, 61% of U.S. consumers said they trusted financial institutions somewhat or completely. Among Black and Latino households, that figure was closer to half. More interestingly, the research found that people evaluate financial institutions on different dimensions: whether their money is safe, whether the advice is sound, whether costs and fees are transparent, and whether the institution genuinely wants to improve their financial health.
Pay attention to these 4 because that distinction matters. Someone can trust a bank with their paycheck and still question its advice. They can believe their money is safe and assume the fees aren’t entirely transparent.
In other words, trust isn’t a single feeling a campaign can win. It’s built through a series of experiences, and different people may influence each one.
Look at the Network and Ecosystem Around the Decision
People rarely make high-stakes decisions alone. Someone influences the choice, someone validates it, and someone often explains what the fine print actually means.
For Latino customers, some of those relationships may sit well outside the financial system.
A study of Latino churches and faith-based organizations found that approximately 94% provide social services, including financial literacy. For some families, the first person who explained how credit works wasn’t a banker. It was someone they already knew and trusted.
That’s not unique to banking. Healthcare, pharma, energy, insurance, higher education, professional services: anywhere the decision is complicated, consequential, or difficult to undo, there is a network or ecosystem around the customer.
And that’s where community relationships become more than a marketing channel.
We’ve discussed before that banks should show up in the community before they ask for anything. We still believe that. But a sponsorship puts your name in the room. The bigger opportunity is to learn from the room.
What does this organization understand about your customers that your data doesn’t? What experiences have made people skeptical? Who do they turn to when they need advice? What did those institutions do to earn their trust?
The answers may lead to a better campaign. They may also lead somewhere much more important: the product, the contract language, the customer experience, or the way your team explains fees and services.
That’s the difference between using cultural intelligence to improve a campaign and using it to understand the market you’re actually trying to grow.
Here’s what to do this week
Pick one high-trust market you want to grow. Put your customer in the middle of a page and map the people and institutions around them.
Who do they trust with questions about money, health, education, housing, or their future? Who influences the decision? Who helps them make sense of it?
Then look at the map.
Wherever your institution’s name doesn’t appear, there’s something to learn. And whoever’s name does appear is worth listening to.
Your next growth opportunity may not be sitting in another audience segment.
It may already be sitting in the trust ecosystem around your customer.
Pam is Captiva’s Co- Founder and Chief Brand Officer. She’s a bilingual (English/Spanish) communications strategist with 17+ years of experience spanning federal agencies, nonprofits, and the private sector. She’s led science-based public health campaigns for federal clients including the FDA (genetically modified foods), HHS Office on Women’s Health (multicultural communications), and CDC (Zika awareness, English and Spanish), building measurable brand awareness on complex topics for diverse audiences.
