Affiliate plug-ins damaging brand

We’ve been made aware recently of an interesting brand-damaging phenomenon arising from the placement of affiliate content within e-commerce websites.

We’ve been testing a number of websites in the travel industry recently and these sites are commonly signed up to one or more affiliates that provide the website with the ability to add functionality and earn revenues.

Typically, these sites will insert some code into the body of their site and that code will run an external call that presents certain information or functionality to the user. For example, a tourism site may have an embedded control that allows people to search for and book hotels.

Here’s an example:

Apart from obvious problems with usability and user-experience, we’ve found that a high number of people expressing a sense of distrust in BOTH the company who’s site they are visiting and with the affiliate site as well.

This was astonishingly apparent on a site that had embedded a Virgin Blue flight booking control into the page. Now, Virgin Blue has a pretty good reputation right, in fact probably one of the best reputations any company can have. But the control was perceived as deceptive and the prospective customers expressed that they had kind of lost some trust and probably would not go ahead with the transaction. "I’m not really sure who I’m dealing with now" was the typical comment.

So why was this? It wasn’t that the branding of either company here was in any way deceptive, the control was bright ‘Virgin’ red, normal virgin logo’s etc. So what was it. The problem as far as I see it was that it just did not fit with the users expectations and was a complete visual mis-match with the rest of the [well designed] page. The colours, styling, fonts everything was off. This is just the same in the United Travel/Zuji example above.

What these affiliate companies should be thinking seriously about is a greater level of customization to their affiliate controls to make the experience much more seamless for the customer. Not doing so is simply damaging brand and sales.