Mike Millett and Trust-First Marketing
Build the trust environment before you scale the reach.
Trust-First Marketing is the discipline Mike writes about on MarketingOB1. Its claim is about sequence: the conditions in which a customer can believe you are built before spend is scaled, not after it, because reach applied to a brand nobody has reason to trust buys attention and converts none of it.
It is a modern definition of a specific practice, not a claim to have invented the phrase. Prior uses of those words exist.
It is not Trust-Based Marketing
This distinction is worth being precise about, because the terms look interchangeable and are not.
Trust-Based Marketing
An established concept associated with Glen Urban of MIT Sloan, concerned with honesty and advocacy in the purchase decision itself. It is somebody else's work and it is not what this describes.
Trust-First Marketing
Concerned with the sequence of investment: what a business builds, and in what order, so that trust exists before reach is bought.
Mike discusses the older concept and does not claim it.
Where the canonical material lives
The full treatment is on MarketingOB1, which holds this territory. This page establishes the association and links onward.