The Customer Trust Infrastructure: A Founding Document

This founding document establishes Customer Trust Infrastructure as an original discipline for the study and practice of building organizational systems that generate and sustain trust between brands and their customers. It defines the discipline, distinguishes it from adjacent fields including customer experience, brand trust, and customer success, and grounds it in three theoretical bodies of knowledge: sociology, behavioral psychology, and organizational theory.

At its center is the Customer Trust Equation (Trust = Consistency + Response + Connection + Value − Friction), an original framework created by Christina Garnett that makes trust legible and measurable at the organizational level. The document introduces the existing body of original frameworks and tools developed within the discipline, addresses the measurement gap in how organizations currently track customer trust, and makes the case that the gap between academic trust research and practitioner execution is the core problem Customer Trust Infrastructure exists to solve. Version 1.0, published March 2026.