As a marketing guy, I believe the smartest thing I can do to stay sharp is to spend a part of each day keeping up with what others are doing – and saying – in the world of marketing. In particular, I like to look at TV ads (go figure), listen to commercial radio, flip through magazines, and read the trades. I also enjoy reading marketing blogs, especially those written by people whose opinions I respect and value. Exhibit A: Ries’ Pieces, a marketing blog penned by Laura Ries. Laura is a crack marketer in her own right (you’ve likely seen her on one of the cable news channels) and author, and is the daughter of Al Ries, for my money, one of the living ‘gods of marketing.’ The senior Ries, along with his then-partner, Jack Trout, wrote a couple of the most influential books on marketing ever, including Positioning, the bible for how to view your brand within your marketspace.

I was reading Laura’s blog the other day, and noted her comments on the re-packaging/re-branding of Tropicana orange juice. I hadn’t noticed that Tropicana had changed their packaging prior to this, so I made it a point to visit the refrigerated section of my local grocery emporium, just to see what all the hubbub was about.What I found was…interesting. My conclusion was that, while Ms. Ries makes some incredibly valid and insightful points, there were a couple of things she missed. To wit…

One of the things I do is design packaging. Packaging design is one part science, one part art, and one part alchemy, because you can design something that is both attractive and follows all the rules of behavioral science, and still end up with something that causes your product to fall into a black hole of invisibility on the shelf. This is the fate that befell Tropicana.

Aside from the stupidity, hubris, and arrogance of some CEO’s plan to completely revamp all their brands (a sure and certain sign of managerial arrogance in the vein of a dog marking their territory). Unless your sales are in the tank and you’ve got nothing to lose, changing an establish brand’s messaging, positioning, and branding is a fool’s errand. And yet, that’s exactly what Tropicana did.

Good brands evolve. To change a brand’s look and feel abruptly is essentially throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Laura cites a number of brand logos that have evolved recently. In every case, you can see a linnage between the old and the new. That’s as it should be – there’s a family resemblance between the old and the new, like a son resembles his father. The new Tropicana brand bears zero resemblance to it’s fore-bearer. None. Zip. Zilch. Nada. No straw in the orange. No emphasis on the fruit. Instead, we see a glass of orange juice (not an orange at all). The biggest text on the box states “100% orange” – while the brand name is twisted sideways, making it more difficult to read. On the old packaging, you couldn’t miss “Tropicana” – the name was the most prominent thing on the box outside the orange with the straw in it. On the new box, the designer chose what looks like Futura Medium as a typeface – possibly the most soul-less face ever designed. It screams “generic!” The old box used a face that evokes Carmen Miranda, Rio de Janerio, and Xavier Cugat. The old face is fun. The old face is distinctive.  The old face is “tropical.” The new typeface is none of that.

Here’s the central problem – there’s nothing wrong with the old Tropicana packaging. It’s attractive, distinctive, and has that much sought-after, elusive quality that I like to call “it stands out from the crowd.” Seriously. Go to your local supermarket and visit the refrigerated section where they keep the juice. Stand back, and see what catches your eye. If you’re like me, you’ll notice that the new Tropicana packaging is nigh on invisible. It was actually kind of weird, in that “these are not the droids you seek” kind of way. My eye went right by the Tropicana section and stopped on the Minute Maid and Florida Natural packages. I had to scan the section again before I even saw the Tropicana boxes. Not good. Then I realized why. The Tropicana packaging re-design makes the product look like a generic, house brand. That’s bad. That’s VERY bad, especially for a ‘premium’ brand. When Joe or Jane Consumer is in your aisle to make a purchase, the last thing you want is for your packaging to challenge them to a game of “Where’s Waldo.”

Let’s get real. Until Tropicana came along, orange juice was thought of as a commodity. Tropicana did for orange juice what Starbucks did for coffee – created a nationally-recognized brand around a product that tasted better, and was worth a little extra coin. The last thing in the world you want to do for a premium brand is to make its packaging look like that of a discount brand.

Some years back, I was approached by a software publisher to create a dozen or so packages for some games and utilities. He wanted packaging that helped set the price point at around $50 a pop. Set the price point with packaging, you say? You’re not suggesting we print the price on the package are you? Nope. For you see the look and size of the package can say a lot about the product’s perceived cost and it’s worth to the consumer.

I’d designed retail packaging for software products for years before this particular project, but it had always been for the kinds of apps you expect to pay $499 and up. Some years back, Walmart had established a “standard” for packaging for their stores which set the width and height (so they could standardize their shelving and merchandising in the software section) and the industry went along with the idea. This stopped guys like Microsoft from releasing products with boxes full of air, designed to take up so much shelf space that they drove the competitors, quite literally, off the shelves. (Think back to the launch packaging for Microsoft Excel…it was a double-wide package, filled mostly with air.) With a standardized face dimension, other factors had to come into play to help the consumer determine the “worth” of the product, packaging-wise…the thickness of the box and the sophistication of the graphic design were the two big ones.

My client wanted some packaging that screamed “this product is worth $50!” Conversely, he didn’t want a package that was so slick that it left the consumer with the impression that the product should sell for $99 or more – because then they’d wonder “what’s wrong with this product, and why is it selling for such a low price.” When expectations don’t match perception, it’s easy to lose a sale.

That’s the problem with the Tropicana boxes. They look like discount-brand, house-brand, cheap goods that you’d more likely find at a dollar store (not that there’s anything wrong with that) as opposed to a premium brand for which you’d be willing to pay a premium price. There’s nothing wrong with freshening a package design. But there’s everything wrong with a radical rethink of a successful brand. That’s brand suicide.

According to Laura, Tropicana has bowed to consumer pressure (read: “their sales fell off a cliff when the new boxes were launched”) and have decided to go back to the old packaging. I hope somebody’s ox gets gored over that one. Unfortunately, it’s not likely to be the CEO’s – the person that likely put this train wreck in motion. I’m sure some hapless marketing manager or art director will get the ax instead. (In chess, you can sacrifice pawns – never the king.) Still, if this is the kind of brilliant marketing we can expect from the PepsiCo CEO, it shouldn’t take long for more stunts like this to cause a major shakeup, and a changing of the guard at the top of the food chain.

[A side note: If Tropicana is looking for really stupid ideas, they can always come out with a "Tropicana Frozen Concentrate" version of their "not from concentrate" product. That's the only thing that I can think of that would kill their positioning faster than what they did here.]

So how does this affect your brand? During the dot-com boom, there was one S.F.-based startup that adopted the slogan, “find out what sucks…don’t do that.” While that’s a bit rude and crude, the sentiment is sound. Throwing out a well-established brand and package for the sake of worshiping at the altar of “new” is a stupid idea. Refresh = good. Replace = bad. Learn that lesson (that Tropicana missed) and you’ll be one step ahead of the game.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 at 9:27 am and is filed under advertising, design, marketing.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.