There has been a lot of criticism regarding the redesign of Tropicana’s orange juice packaging. The design has been ridiculed by consumers and creatives for its generic look and many have sighted this as the reason for the failure. One can only assume that PepsiCo, after committing an estimated $35 million to roll out of the new design, felt that the research supported the new aesthetic. Now, after massive consumer rejection of the newly-designed cartons, PepsiCo (owner of Tropicana) has reevaluated their decision and reverted to the original design.

The real obstacle presented by the new packaging was a usability problem. When stripped of its iconic brand signal, the orange and straw image, the cartons no longer presented consumers with the visual shorthand they use to quickly identify Tropicana from other juice. The brand’s packaging was simply no longer differentiated from the multitude of other juices that fill the shelves. This caused consumer confusion between brands and additionally between variants within the Tropicana line such as “some pulp,” “no pulp,” etc… With the new simplified aesthetic reducing visual cues to mere indications consumers to differentiate their juice and many mistakenly brought home the wrong Tropicana juice.

One only needs to see the new cartons in context to see the magnitude of the problem. When presented side by side the minimal design doesn’t hold up and with so many variants and so little visual differentiation, Tropicana no longer stood out from the crowd. This created an opportunity for competitive offerings, not the least of which was price. When shoppers stop and think about which juice to buy, they begin to re-asses the value of that purchase. Facing ever tighter budgets, many consumers no longer saw the value and chose store brands or frozen concentrates.

In their quest to reinvent the brand, Tropicana totally lost sight of the consumer experience and removed the very mechanism that shoppers rely on to navigate the supermarket.

Traditional market research methods often mask the value of established brand signals for two reasons. First, they tend to focus on what to change and ignore where value may already exist. This is especially true with heritage brands like Tropicana. Second, they tend to evaluate the final design out of context, using focus groups to evaluate to make unnatural decisions in unnatural environments.

Had Tropicana understood the value that brand signals provide, they could have leveraged their position and forged an even deeper bond with their consumers. Instead, they prompted them to reevaluate their choice of orange juice.

Sometimes the juice just isn’t worth the squeeze.

Categories: Brand Identity, Brand Management, Brand Signals, Brand Strategy