Marketing Miss for Tropicana and TOMS

Not a Fail, but definitely a Miss. Here are pictures of the tag that comes with TOMS shoes and the Tropicana carton – click them to enlarge.

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.