In branding, there’s a pretty basic guideline: don’t change your branding signals (colors, look and feel, packaging, logos, etc.) so much that customers won’t be able to recognize them. There is valuable brand equity invested in a brand’s visual identity and it can be lost if the changes go too far.
On a recent trip to the grocery store, I noticed that Tropicana orange juice recently changed its packaging. Unfortunately, this is one of those cases where the changes may have gone too far.
The first sign of a problem came when I couldn’t find the cartons of Tropicana juice even when I had them in front of me. I had to ask an associate and he pointed them out to me.
To help you visualize the nature of the change, this is the way Tropicana looked before:
And this is how it looks now:
Not only is the new look so bland that it can be confused with a cheap private label store brand, but Tropicana’s most important branding signal: the orange with the red and white straw (possible one of the most brilliant logos of all time) is nowhere on the package!
The characteristic typeface of the Tropicana logo has also been replaced with a boring font that almost looks like the ubiquitous Arial.
So much has changed in Tropicana’s packaging that a competitor now looks more like the old Tropicana than the current version (see below, to the left):
I wonder how many people will grab this other brand thinking that it is Tropicana, and if this package change will end up costing Pepsico (Tropicana’s parent company) significant sales (I would think so).
Think about this before you make changes to your brand’s trade dress.
Yeah not a great redesign, not sure why they did this — a few other people pointed this out to me too with the same reaction as you.
Not sure a single person that I’ve talked to has had a positive reaction. This is probably a result of design by committee in the corporation…
Agree that this is a huge change and the new version while contemporary walks away from all equity.
I am sure they tested and made the call that any short term sales loss would be made up by long term gains.
However, the orange juice category has always been challenging from a branding perspective. If the only differentiation is “taste like fresh squeezed” you are in trouble. Seems to me that’s all the new packaging communicates.
@Adam Singer: yes, I did some searches on the subject after I published the article and found a lot of negative reactions to this redesign. I wonder how many people within the marketing group in Pepsico didn’t agree with it but just had to go with the flow in the end.
@Allen Adamson: Hi Allen, it is an honor to have your comments on my blog. It sure will be interesting to monitor the sales figures in the months to come and see what the real effect will be.
Mario,
I noticed the same thing (as a true lover of Tropicana). I saw shoppers confused, and there was even a week or two where the old and new packaging was out on the same shelving, and almost everyone took the old ones (they probably didn’t even realize that the new ones were tropicana).
I thought it was a generic discount brand and decided if they dont want to make their product appealing to the eye I would buy a brand that did. Simply Orange is my new brand of OJ.
I don’t think that Tropicana/Pepsico was ignorant to the fact that their new packaging looks like a generic brand.