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 is probably going to sound like a “no, DUH!” rant, but have you ever stopped to think about how you market to your market?

In my job as a wanna-be Design Police Commissioner, I see a lot of bad design, good design, and everything in between. Same for marketing. I’ve seen some pitches that would melt hearts, and some that wouldn’t sell a starving man a steak. But the good pitches and designs all have one thing in common – they all target their market with a look and feel – and message – that is appropriate for the people they are trying to reach.

Think about that for a second.

That is actually huge. It is actually possible to miss your target because you didn’t market to them appropriately. Case in point: packaging.

Packaging design tells consumers a lot – it not only holds the product securely for transport, but it tells consumers what the product is, how it works, how to use it, and why you’d want to buy it. It’s the ultimate sales and marketing tool. In many cases it’s both the first and last line of defense for reaching a prospect and turning them into a consumer. Now let’s consider packaging design in relationship to price points.

I’ve designed a lot of product packaging, mostly in the software arena. I learned (the hard way) that the size and design of a package has a huge effect over the perceived value of the product. Let’s take two packages – a big productivity suite (say, Microsoft Office) and a single-purpose utility that comes from the shareware space.

If you’re going to spend more than $399 for a product, you expect it to be substantial – a big box, some heft to it (in the form of documentation…paper’s heavy), and some attractive design. You’d pay $399 for that, right? For an inexpensive utility, you expect a smaller, much lighter box, less packaging, no printed documentation, and design that’s not nearly as attractive and expensive-looking.

Now consider what might happen if you put the MS Office stuff in the utility packaging and the utility in the MS Office box.

Nobody would buy either. Here’s why…

Your packaging has to match the narrative. If your packaging looks cheap, it reflects on the product. Nobody’s going to look at MS Office as being worth more than $399 if the packaging looks like some shareware product. Conversely, if your packaging for a small utility well exceeds it’s image, people will not think, “boy they spent some buck to up-market this product.” They’ll think, “what’s wrong with this application? Why would they sell something that looks this pricey, this cheap?”

Now lets consider some magazines. Ever seen the Thrifty Nickel? It’s basically a bunch of classified ads, some with pictures. It’s printed on newsprint, and looks to be made as cheaply as possible. Would good graphic design help this publication? No, because it appeals to people looking for bargains. Good design is NOT oriented towards bargains.

On the other hand, there’s an “entertainment monthly” published here in Amarillo that could stand a major redesign. If they did a look and feel makeover, I believe they could charge more for ads, and get a lot more respect. (In fairness, they’d have to improve their writing, too.)

Now think about your own marketing. Who are you trying to reach? Are you going after the high end of the market with a low-rent design? Are you trying to go after a price-sensitive market segment with a look and feel that is decidedly neuveau riche? Neither will work. Target your design to your market, as when marketing matches the message, you can get far more resonance. Marketing resonance is like sympathetic vibration – it makes your message louder.