Can you depend on someone you don't trust? Let's say a friend, who doesn't have a good reputation, consistently disappoints you.  And yet you find yourself counting on him (or her) for everything from financial support to medical care.

You don't have to be Dr. Phil to call this a dysfunctional relationship. But it's the relationship that exists between the American people and the business community.

Each year, Edelman Public Relations Worldwide publishes the Edelman Trust Barometer - a survey of college-educated, relatively affluent people in six countries. The purpose of the survey is to measure public trust in business, government, the media and non-profits. This past January, in the depths of the recession, trust in U.S. business reached a new low, with only 38 percent of those polled saying they trusted business to do what is right.

That placed Americans at the bottom of the trust pile with Western Europeans, whose cynicism about big corporations is consistently off the charts.

A July update of the survey found that trust has improved somewhat, but a majority still don't have faith in business. In addition, only 30 percent in the U.S. said multinational corporations had a good reputation.

Here's the kicker. At the same time, 82 percent expect business to create solutions to reduce energy costs, 76 percent want business to provide access to affordable healthcare, 75 percent expect companies to figure out how to solve global warming and 73 percent want them to promote free trade.

So, to recap, we have very high expectations for an institution - big business - that can't be trusted to do the right thing. Were it not for the fact that government also has low ratings, corporate America would probably be facing declining sales and a series of major legislative failures at all levels of public policy.

What's interesting is that, until this year, trust in business had been on the rebound since the Enron scandal. After Hurricane Katrina, when it became clear that companies were better at providing disaster relief than the federal government, public faith in business jumped considerably. It eventually peaked last year at 58 percent. But that was before the collapse of the housing market, the U.S. auto industry and much of Wall Street.

So what do you do when nobody trusts you? According to the Trust Barometer, the best strategies are to treat employees well, provide quality products and services, be transparent and honest and communicate frequently and honestly. You also get credit for creating and keeping jobs, and driving innovation.

At a micro level, taking steps such as repaying bailout or loaned money to the government, reducing CEO and executive pay and firing non-performing management teams will increase your trust level. But, says Edelman, these need to be tangible and quantifiable actions.

Meanwhile, corporate marketing execs have awakened to the fact that, sooner or later, people won't want to do business with untrustworthy companies. A recent article in BusinessWeek profiles the efforts of American Express, McDonald's and Ford to tell the public they've earned the benefit of the doubt. New TV ads from these firms and others have abandoned traditional sales pitches for spots that tout their efforts to help small businesses, support sustainability and demonstrate overall competence.

These efforts are welcome, if for no other reason than they replace commercial hype with earnest efforts to communicate. On the other hand, some companies may think they can "spin" their way out of a poor reputation. But that won't work. As a former marketing exec at UBS told BusinessWeek, "It's really easy for consumers to check and verify a company's behavior to find out if a company's actions match its words."

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