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How did Tropicana lose $30M in a packaging redesign?

bootcamp.uxdesign.cc

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Re: How did Tropicana lose $30M in a packaging redesign?

#31

Post by lupire »

woodruffw wrote: post #27
henvic wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> buying the liquid form means paying for the shipping and space cost of the water. Buying frozen solid means cleaning up your mixer. I also bet it's easier to lose some fiber. Either way, the taste isn't the same as freshly made juice. I'm from Brazil and loved tangerine/mandarin juice since when I was a kid. Now I've moved to the Netherlands and love it even more. How come, you may ask? In Brazil, we usually find t…

> Buying frozen solid means cleaning up your mixer. I also bet it's easier to lose some fiber. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I've always just put the concentrate brick (cylinder?) into a pitcher, filled it up with the right amount of water, and mixed it until fully melted. It's no worse to clean up than anything else in a pitcher would be. I agree completely about fresh-squeezed juices, by the way. I do my own juices…

US has "not from concentrate" juice. That's the primary reason people buy Tropicana instead of store brand.

Re: How did Tropicana lose $30M in a packaging redesign?

#32

Post by bitwize »

tejohnso wrote: post #14

More questions than answers. How is this being so certainly attributed to packaging change? And why was the packaging changed? As it stands, this seems like a major change to a successful brand for no apparent reason. And why would you move away from such a strong and heavily advertised image of the straw in the orange? I remember those commercials and as soon as I saw that straw directly extracting juice from an ora…

Doubtless, some marketroid at Tropicana wanted to position the brand to appeal to $YOUNG_DEMOGRAPHIC (millennials, Zoomers, whatever). And since $YOUNG_DEMOGRAPHIC is on their phones all the time, they reasoned the best way to connect with them is to mimic the clean, flat design of their smartphone OS and apps.

You may think this is phenomenally stupid. And you'd be right, but sometimes it pays off: the original TV Dinner was only television themed. The practice of eating it in front of the TV was not part of the branding or marketing, at least not at first.

Re: How did Tropicana lose $30M in a packaging redesign?

#33

Post by bee_rider »

tomcam wrote: post #2

It is my theory, backed up by nothing but instinct and my own very fallible personal experience, that many customers simply did not “see“ the new design. That is, they would have preferred to buy Tropicana but assumed it had disappeared from the shelves.

Yeah.

The article has all this stuff about emotional attachment, blah blah blah.

Really, orange juice is kinda hit and miss, so I prefer to stick with a particular brand (Tropicana). The redesign is

1) totally unrecognizable

2) pretty generic looking

It is literally just hard to spot next to the other juices.

Re: How did Tropicana lose $30M in a packaging redesign?

#34

Post by [deleted] »

woodruffw wrote: post #27
henvic wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> buying the liquid form means paying for the shipping and space cost of the water. Buying frozen solid means cleaning up your mixer. I also bet it's easier to lose some fiber. Either way, the taste isn't the same as freshly made juice. I'm from Brazil and loved tangerine/mandarin juice since when I was a kid. Now I've moved to the Netherlands and love it even more. How come, you may ask? In Brazil, we usually find t…

> Buying frozen solid means cleaning up your mixer. I also bet it's easier to lose some fiber. Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I've always just put the concentrate brick (cylinder?) into a pitcher, filled it up with the right amount of water, and mixed it until fully melted. It's no worse to clean up than anything else in a pitcher would be. I agree completely about fresh-squeezed juices, by the way. I do my own juices…

[deleted]

Re: How did Tropicana lose $30M in a packaging redesign?

#35

Post by makecheck »

What seems to be lost in these “redesigns” is the why: why are you doing it? If there isn’t a list of benefits long enough to justify the cost and possible risk, well, that’s a problem.

There’s also a tendency for companies to be super proud of what they’ve done so they neglect methods like A/B testing and instead just bet the farm on their great new design. After all, it cost a lot of money and looks cool to the decision-makers so what could go wrong? Um, maybe before you throw out all of your packaging everywhere and double-down, you could tone it down a little and try it out in a few small markets first? Then watch and see if sales are going up or down? Then think about going further?

And at this point there is also a tendency to ignore history. This is far from the first big failed redesign; what is going on that no one is looking at past failures (plenty of which have had high costs to other brands too), and imagining that there might be a downside?

Re: How did Tropicana lose $30M in a packaging redesign?

#37

Post by lelandfe »

tootie wrote: post #21
lelandfe wrote: post #13

This article looks like an odd repackaging (wink) of the original: https://medium.com/loceye/how-we-predicted-tropicanas-big-fa... ...Which is also maybe a bit tenuous, given that they just had people do eye tracking on renders of the packaging, and the two cartons are angled differently. Does that translate into real world eye attention?

That is linked from the main article and is itself a bit of an ad for their eye-tracking software with some dubious claims. But it did send me down a rabbit hole over the agency that did the package design. The design came from Arnell Group headed by Peter Arnell. Arnell was retained to rebrand both Tropicana and Pepsi (same parent corp) and the produced the infamous logo redesign deck that circulated back in 2008: h…

My favorite quote from Arnell around that logo:

> "When I design things, I design in a pure vacuum. When I did the Pepsi logo, I told Pepsi that I wanted to go to Asia, to China and Japan, for a month and tuck myself away and just design it and study it and create it," he said. "There was a lot of research, a lot of consumer data points ... and dialogue that I had with the folks at Pepsi, consumers and retailers. We knew what we were doing."

There was a lot of data. But I also design in a vacuum. But I talked to consumers.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090121113422/http://adage.com/...

edit: also, how could I forget the Lemon Demon song! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAG7pye0V1g

Re: How did Tropicana lose $30M in a packaging redesign?

#38

Post by ameister14 »

woodruffw wrote: post #16

This is a little bit of a tangent, but I've always thought that it was funny that orange juice is overwhelmingly sold in liquid form, not as frozen concentrate. You can buy concentrate here in the US, but it's much less common (and, IME, fewer and fewer grocery stores stock it.) Given that most liquid orange just is just reconstituted concentrate anyways, buying the liquid form means paying for the shipping and space…

>Given that most liquid orange just is just reconstituted concentrate anyways, buying the liquid form means paying for the shipping and space cost of the water.

You're incorrect. The "fresh" non-concentrated market is a lot bigger than the concentrate market in the US, at least. Has been since the 80's. It's more than a 10:1 ratio, actually.

Re: How did Tropicana lose $30M in a packaging redesign?

#39

Post by b112 »

tomcam wrote: post #2

It is my theory, backed up by nothing but instinct and my own very fallible personal experience, that many customers simply did not “see“ the new design. That is, they would have preferred to buy Tropicana but assumed it had disappeared from the shelves.

Yes, I have lost, literally lost things I liked to buy at the grocery, due to changed packaging.

One time I had to Google images for a 20 minutes to find old images, then write down the brand/ type.

Another, the package changed, and the new package stated some strange "new" ingredient, which left me struggling to know if the flavour changed.

I honestly would just prefer a package never changes for my entire life.

Edit: also, I don't want my favourite food to be "new and improved!". Leave it alone!

Re: How did Tropicana lose $30M in a packaging redesign?

#40

Post by userbinator »

makecheck wrote: post #35

What seems to be lost in these “redesigns” is the why : why are you doing it? If there isn’t a list of benefits long enough to justify the cost and possible risk, well, that’s a problem. There’s also a tendency for companies to be super proud of what they’ve done so they neglect methods like A/B testing and instead just bet the farm on their great new design. After all, it cost a lot of money and looks cool to the de…

I suspect the "why" is most simply explained by "because designers had to justify their salaries."
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