The low-down on TOMS: They will make a tax-deductible time-delayed donation if you buy their shoes.

The low-down on Tropicana: They will save a piece of the rainforest if and only if you buy their juice.
Now, if they had read the research Robert Cialdini penned into Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive on chapter 12, they would have found out that their appeal is falling largely on deaf ears.

As Cialdini puts it:

There’s little social obligation to cooperate with someone who offers you something only on the condition that you initiate the cooperative effort. That kind of exchange is simply an economic transaction

For Tropicana’s or TOMS’ appeals to be as successful as they can be, they have to stimulate reciprocity a bit, perhaps by stating how many shoes have been donated by other TOMS shoe-people or roughly how many acres of rainforest are being saved by Tropicana. Experiments Cialdini points to showed a tremendous difference in results when all that was changed was the description of the eye-for-eye exchange into a description of what the company had done in the past.

In a nutshell: Pay it forward, and communicate you’re doing so.

TOMS shoe tag "an-eye-for-an-eye" offer

Tropicana carton "You pay me, I save you" offer

Premise: We judge the health and authority of a site in relationship to the advertising (or lack of) it carries.

If you went to a corporate website – such as Microsoft.com or Apple.com – and bumped into a slew of banner ads for products from other companies, what would you think? That you went to the wrong site? That they’re not doing so well that they need ads? That’s a pretty straightforward example – you’re expecting a major player and they’re peppering your screen with semi-related offers.

Here is where it gets interesting. If the site has low authority in a field – like a personal blog (ahem), adding a limited number of ads in the right places sends a completely different message – to some it will lend the credibility that comes with a publisher that cares about their blog enough to try to monetize it. You expect the site to potentially be a source of income for the publisher, regardless if it is just an online doodle. To everyone else, regardless of knowledge or experience, there is an association of ideas that takes, and the concepts associated to the ads become related to the blog in the visitor’s mind – its a matter of degrees, of course.

Ad quality transfers to site experience

If the ads on a site are of good quality, it can ad a veneer of credibility/authority to the site regardless of its content. As an example, this site is currently displaying ads for a Web 2.0 application development platform, and some brick-and-mortar universities. This is as close as the blog is going to get in terms of getting associated with such powerful brands – If I have a big ad for Harvard university, some ideas you have associated with that institution are transferred to the experience you receive from my site. If I have the Harvard site everywhere, the more you visit my blog the more the idea of my blog will be related to the concepts you hold with the Harvard logo. Now imagine if my ads were for something shady, like get-rich-quick schemes or using bad logos – like the Enron logo.

This cuts both ways – The danger for advertisers is clear here: As an advertiser you must manage your website placements so you don’t end up associated to the wrong concepts.

Related articles

• Who clicks on banner ads? (sciencetext.com)
• Currencies that buy credibility (brandingblog.com)