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.
I think you're spot on. The older design shouts out "TROPICANA"; it's bad enough they removed the iconic orange from the new design, but you have to tilt your head 90 degrees to even read the logo.
I'm inclined to agree. The article's talk about "resonating" with the audience is wishy-washy, and seems far-fetched for accounting for a 20% decrease in sales.
On the other hand, a UX design tenet is to test, not assume. Just because it sounds right doesn't mean it's the correct explanation (that goes for both TFA and alternative theories).
It actually happened to me, actually more than once on drastically changed designs. I buy the same thing I had at home, because I like it, and why change things that work?
At the store, I don't see it. I may notice that product with the same name, but the spell is broken, it is no longer the product I mindlessly buy again and again, and it may be a good occasion to try something else. Even worse, I may end up buying competing products that look more like the original design than the new design of the same brand.
I've seen some brands where they changed the design, but they have a plan to retrain people. There will be a callback to the old design on part of the packaging, or they use the old packaging but change the name, but on the top corner write 'same great taste as whatever the old name was'. Maybe they wait a few months or even years to confirm that sales didn't fall before they can fully shed the old branding.
I agree with all of this. Re#2 it’s even worse than pretty generic. It looks like a generic/unbranded OJ, and for some reason it looks like a low quality OJ to boot.
I’m guessing it’s a picture of their actual juice, but it looks very bland, especially compared to the bright ORANGE color of… an actual orange (or at least, of an over saturated orange).
Yeah the problem is simply loyal customers not being able to find the product. Supermarket shopping is a continuous game of Where's Wally, especially if you shop in a different one to your regular. Don't make that game harder.
I think most importantly it's that sideways text is harder to process at a glance than what we're used to. So, it ends up becoming a design element rather than text. And the orange/straw icon is also, in some ways, a pictograph for recognition.
If you're not aware, "New and improved" generally means the product was changed to reduce ingredient costs. So hopefully I've ruined the "meaning" for you.
What I feel like can happen with these changes is they'd probably push this as "See how much money we've saved by using these ingredients instead and the change in taste is barely noticeable!". Then they'll go through this process 10 times in the span of years and you'd end up with something that taste completely different than the original.
Likewise. My wife once sent me to the store to buy Cheerios and Honey Crisp Apples. I grabbed the Cheerios, then, still on the cereal isle, I looked everywhere for thr Honey Crisp Apples - before I realized the Apples were apples in the produce department
I think Apple Honey Crisp was a cereal at one point...
And the Honey Crisp apple is very new. Even though released in the 1990s, it takes decades for production to grow, and, for other regions to get cultivars and start selling them too.
Then on top of all that, for most people to even know about new apple flavours, it must compete for space at the grocery...
Yeah, honestly, I think there are several brands I buy in grocery stores for which I don't know, or at least don't remember, the brand name. I just recognize the packaging and think "oh yeah, that's the one I like".
I'm relieved this is the second-to-the-top parent comment.
They literally did an eye gaze study showing that just about no one saw the logo (and even fewer read it), yet their conclusion is some emotional fugazi.
Yes - if I'm interpreting that rapidly-changing GIF correctly, where previously people were drawn to the brand name now their eyes focused on "100% Orange" ... which completely commoditizes the contents.
"I couldn't find the stuff we normally get, so I bought this one because it was cheaper".
100%. The design is also just completely shit. There’s nothing wrong with it in terms of it being more “modern” and “minimal” it’s just designed by someone who isn’t at remotely good at graphic design and overseen by people who are similarly clueless. I’m sure the designers were able to ask the right questions to get the responses they wanted from their focus groups. The blind leading the blind
The eye-tracking heat map GIF in this article supports this too. Before everyone saw the logo, after they didn't. My first thought when I saw the new one was that it looks like an own-brand product, that heatmap probably explains why.
The new design doesn’t mention the pulp level and that’s one of the main things I’m thinking about when trying to pick out an OJ. So when you pair that with a redesign, it’s unclear to me what’s in the carton.
...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: https://www.reddit.com/r/Design/comments/hspqgd/pepsi_logo_r...
My guess is that Pepsi didn't know what they were doing, hired an agency who came on really strong with a ton of bravado about how their instincts trump research and got sold a pile of magic beans.
> "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.
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 orange I associated the brand as being as close to pure, fresh orange juice as possible. I was young.
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.
> How is this being so certainly attributed to packaging change?
Consumers complained about the packaging.
Sales fell 20% in the two months following the packaging rollout
Sales presumably rose after the packaging was reverted (although I don't see a specific calling out of this).
Presumably the product didn't change (it takes a while for people to notice and respond to a product change anyway). Advertising changed, obviously, but I'd guess the spending stayed the same, or even went up.
You could probably run user studies too, but those weren't reported. Maybe pay for the product to go on the Price Is Right with different branding and see how it affects price guesses, etc.
> And why would you move away from such a strong and heavily advertised image of the straw in the orange?
Yeah I dunno. The cap shaped like an orange was cute, but practically invisible. The glass of orange juice wasn't very distinctive at all.
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 cost of the water.
Also interesting that elsewhere liquid concentrate is also popular. Which has the same benefits as frozen but with less of the hassle. Sometimes called Squash[0].
I got into the mango orange juice, and it got really hard to find.. which led me to frozen and there’s no going back! There are so many more options, and a lot more options without added sugars and corn syrup being added to the mix.
In case you were avoiding added sugars and corn syrup due to nutritional concerns, I have heard doctors for over a decade come to the conclusion that fruit juice is as bad as soda due to the total sugar content. You would not eat 10 oranges, but you can easily drink 10 oranges worth of sugar in a few gulps.
One of the questions pediatricians ask nowadays is do you keep fruit juice in the house, and I believe they ask so that they can advise you to get rid of it or prevent the kids from drinking it.
> 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 tangerine pulps. Here, I buy fresh tangerine in the supermarket. Sure thing, it takes much longer to squeeze them and clean things up... but the taste is 5 times better.
> 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 directly when I have time! But the point was about American consumers, who are buying reconstituted concentrate anyways (just that someone's done the reconstituting for them.)
I think most Tropicana in the US is from concentrate. "Pure Premium" is their sub-brand for NFC (not-from-concentrate) at the moment; they've previously called it "Tropicana Natural" but were sued since even NFC orange juice requires significant processing to make it last more than a few days.
(Which goes to the other point: most store brand orange juice comes from your local Dole, Minute Maid, or Tropicana distribution center, which is bottling/filling the cartons from concentrate. It's all the same supply chain, the only thing that's different is the brand tax.)
Edit: Weakened the claim about how much is from concentrate, because I'm having trouble finding a statistic.
Second edit: I'm wrong, the majority of orange juice sold in the US is NFC. So this is a market distinction I wasn't aware of.
not from concentrate does not mean it isnt reconstituted. its just that instead of removing the water to preserve it they remove the oxygen. deaeration removes more flavor than dehydration, so they must be put back in. thats why tropicana tastes more like orange juice than orange juice
I keep reading this here but this is forbidden by law in France (as they call it "100% pur jus"). They could add vitamin C if they wanted but they don't seem to, given the nutritional data.
Is Tropicana juice different in the US and in the EU?
Not wrong at all, this is a great idea (as long as it mixes well).
I've resorted to something similar when making my tangerine juice: I put some water, ice, and a sugar cane "square" in the jar or cups first, and then go to squeeze the juice. By the time I'm over making lunch or dinner, the juice is ready without having to use a spoon to mix it.
>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.
Do you have a source for that? Not that I don't believe you; it's just surprising. My understanding was that orange juice ships poorly, even among fruit juices, which is why the concentrate market was still large.
Edit: I found a survey from 2009[1] where non-reconstituted orange juice was over 50% of the market. So I'm completely wrong about this!
"Not from concentrate" juice is still pasteurised and stored in tanks for months or years before being packaged into the final supermarket packaging, with vitamins, minerals and flavourings added to revive it. It's not any healthier than concentrate, but it is more expensive to store and transport as the water isn't removed.
The problem is that to store orange juice "fresh, never concentrated" you have to take all the oxygen out, this makes the juice taste like... well nothing. so then they have to put the flavor back in.
It makes me wonder if the frozen concentrate is actually closer to the original orange than the "fresh never concentrated" stuff?
The newer one could have been fixed with a distinctive flair such as a green line following the brim of the glass or an orange peel besides it in the corner or a separate glass coloring for the base of the glass, anything that separates it from the everyday.
The problem is there's no motif. It doesn't need the straw orange but it does need some thing.
If you have a hard time distinctly describing it, generally you have a hard time remembering it
A lot of things I don't buy super often, I just remember the packaging or color and not the brand name. In this case, I'd remember the orange with the straw and a green logo, maybe. In fact, before opening the article, I knew about the OJ with that image, but no idea it was Tropicana.
So if I liked that brand, and went in and couldn't find that image, I'd probably just pick something at random.
I hadn't noticed the redesign (I don't buy OJ all that often). But looking at it - the sentence at the bottom of the article totally matches my impression of it being a discount store brand.
> On the other hand, the new packaging failed to impress the consumers, with clean lines, a lack of visuals, transforming the once indistinguishable orange juice into a "generic store brand" product.
It reminds me of the failed redesign of the JC Penny logo. The new logo was crisp, clean, modern, and was 100% not what their customers were looking for.
I figured rebranding Kentucky Fried Chicken to "KFC" would cost them the farm, but it doesn't seem to have hurt. The Penney's people probably felt they could get away with the same approach.
As long as they don't lose the Colonel, they can't screw up too bad. And since the actual Colonel Sanders has been dead for years and replaced by a cartoon, he's now immortal.
I was going through a bunch of old newspapers I inherited from my mother. I noticed in one of them from the '60s that they had an ad for a "Sanders Cafe", some kind of Kentucky-Fried Chicken precursor. A marketing redesign I was never aware of.
The news articles were interesting... "Nixon swears he'll never resign". But the old marketing was also fascinating. I had to ask my wife what the ad meant which was advertising "fashion for ladies-in-waiting".
The new logo was hideous and the giant square box they put in every store window looked bad lol.
It's funny thinking about that now, because JCPenney just like every other retail big box chain, got rid of all their window displays decades ago. I dunno what they were thinking. It's still not uncommon to drive past a macys and see a giant facade that's mostly painted over because they decided they didn't need window displays.
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?
In my experience, the "why" is more often called by a manager, director, or VP who wants a big project under their belt. The amount of times a "major design change" has happened from the bottom-up is very, very, almost impossibly rare in most cases. Sad story, but a true story.
I worked on a website that was completely redesigned every few years. We, the developers, didn’t understand why until one of the business people, who was leaving for a new job, admitted to us that they (the business management team) mainly did it because it was fun, because it let them expense meetings/travel/food doing “research” and meeting with design consultants, because it gave them something to do other than their real (hard) job of getting 3rd parties to use the current website, because it gave them something to report to their managers, etc.
Preface: I think a lot of us - particularly developers - have a tendency to mock/devalue what people in design and UI/UX do.
I think there's incredible value in what they do and part of that is keeping sites from going stale. I believe that in general people get fatigue from seeing the same design day-in, day-out. There's a cost to not changing. Or at least a trade-off.
The risk is when redesign is carte blanche for the design team to do things that they think are pretty without the requisite user testing and data to back up decisions.
Major design changes should come with a nice set of data to support them.
I think that fatigue of seeing the same design is real. But I also think that for the most part, company employees, executives are the only people who see the sites frequently enough for it to be a problem.
For a lot of websites I visit frequently what I want is ease of use and familiarity. Redesigns are often a bother since I need to learn to navigate the new site.
For sites I don't visit as often I likely won't really notice a redesign.
I haven't had a Facebook account for many years now, but I remember that what bothered me about their redesigns wasn't how they changed visuals to keep up to date. It was a rapid series of restructurings which meant you always felt you didn't know where to find things.
Craig's List looks dated, but remains incredibly functional and is still the top site in its segment. Its dated look doesn't scare people away. It is still very functional. That's the important part.
Yet Craigslist appears to be steadily losing traffic each and every year since 2017, so I’m not sure it’s the best example.
Meanwhile Facebook marketplace is nipping at their feet while they are staying static.
Clearly Craigslist is incredibly profitable and successful, and possibly more profitable in the short term because they aren’t investing, but IMO remaining static means you lose ground eventually.
Major redesigns to marketing pieces (aka, advertisements) are fine. No one spends a long time staring at them anyway.
Major redesigns to tools will annoy the hell out of their users, unless things are done very carefully indeed (or the old tool was indisputably awful). You've got to look at how novices onboard to and use them, how intermediate users use them, how experts use them, and, if you can find one, how a master uses the tool. (The master will probably do something that surprises you. Make sure your redesign does not piss the master off, unless you like firefighting.) That's a lot of work!
Unfortunately, most things in life are tools by this definition, or at least close enough to them.
I’ve absolutely sat in RFP processes where a product is discounted because it ‘feels old and legacy’, so you are absolutely right that there is value in the emotional feel of a product.
There is definitely a perception that if the front end of the product is old and hasn’t had a refresh, that it’s probably the same with the rest of the product and it’s sitting in maintenance mode.
But a lot of non techy users get confused very quickly. My family members, and not just older ones, are constantly having problems with app's changing things around, smart smart TV moving things around, apps changing icons etc.
I am usually their first call and I can tell you, that a lot redesigns, even when they are clearly better designs, leave a lot of users confused.
And it annoys me because not only are they usually annoyed when they call, but somehow its my problem. There is a reason why I am on backend. I don't like dealing with users.
Not that different from some rewriting, refactoring or moving to $TECHNOLOGY I saw in the last 20 years of my career. Probably minus the travel/food...err no, I forget the mandatory conferences to understand better the new tech and know how other companies use it!
It's similar to how some development choices are made too. Examples: Rewriting the system in a new language, change a framework or create your own from scratch.
I have fallen into that trap myself. I have read about some exciting new tech in a blog and want to try it out in a POC. There may be some excitement around it and suddenly it becomes a MVP and placed into production. Eventually it evolves into "legacy code" that developers hate to touch. The right approach is sometimes to step back, and rewrite the POC in a language/framework that can be supported by others.
As the rebrand was outsourced (like most rebrands) the "why" is absolutely not so designers can justify their salaries.
Design as a department is very often under resourced and I'd take a strong wager that the designers who actually work for Tropicana were dreading all the unnecessary work this rebrand was surely going to generate for them.
This is always used as an excuse but it ignores that rebrands like this rarely come from in-house designers. Execs will contact an outside design firm and ask for a rebrand, spend obscene amounts of money (relative to the size of the company) and then hand the design to the in-house designers to execute on it and turn the mock ups into actual usable assets.
I am absolutely certain that this explains the changes to the iOS Safari changes. Someone justified their existence in Apple by moving the close button in the mini fixed tabs display from the left—the side it’s displayed on the tabs themselves—to the right.
Yup. The "Why?" question gets lost among the impulse to be 'clean and modern'.
>>Tropicana’s original packaging had rich colours and a strong visual hierarchy. On the other hand, the new packaging failed to impress the consumers, with clean lines, a lack of visuals, transforming the once indistinguishable orange juice into a “generic store brand” product.
This same thing happens in everything else too, such as automotive controls and web design.
The damn "designers" are so infatuated with their "principles" of design and aesthetics that they completely ignore the fact that DESIGN IS SECONDARY TO FUNCTION — if you make it stop working, your design sucks, no matter how good you think it looks.
Whether you make it harder to notice the brand that I've always associated with good fruit juice, harder to find the controls to my automobile by touch while the windshield is fogging with blinding glare of oncoming cars, or just harder to find a common function on your web page/app, IDGAF how aesthetically pleasing, clean, or hip your "design is" — you had one job and you FAILED.
How designers and their teachers and managers can so consistently and massively fail to understand that fundamental concept is just baffling.
The article indicates the re-design in question was "launched" in January 2008. This is the date where planning the redesign began.
Another article [1] indicates that the new design was deployed on January 8th, 2009, and Tropicana announced a return to the old design on February 23rd, 2009.
A quick search shows an article [2] indicating around 2018 was when the panic around plastic straws began (with, for example, Seattle banning plastic straws starting in July 2018).
So in this case, the plastic straw issue does necessarily appear to be related to the redesign.
> The damn "designers" are so infatuated with their "principles" of design and aesthetics
I agree with your main point, but I have a small objection to this phrase. I don't think principles of design tells you to not care about usability/function. In fact, a good design is aesthetics AND function, as argued in "The Design of Everyday Things"[1].
So in this case, the designers are simply not doing their job. They've been infatuated with their principles of aesthetics, that they didn't follow the actual principles of design. Which happens when designers blindly copy the latest trend.
The reason I'm bringing this up is that one might interpret the phrase to mean that design is not about function, which isn't fair to many great designers out there.
Agree, I should have specified "aesthetic principles" (vs "'principles' of design and aesthetics").
Yes, the actual great designers put function first, then solve the now-harder problem of simplifying the aesthetics without sacrificing the function.
Had an architect (trained, licensed, etc.) propose a redesigned front porch and put a support post right square in front of an existing bay window. Sure, from the front elevation view, it looked great, but squarely blocked the view from inside. Also proposed just building the wrap=around part without moving a natgas meter, just left it obstructing part of the side entry. What a waste of time and money - she just solved the problems she wanted to solve (e.g., make it look good in her drawing) and ignored all the other problems - and was proud of that.
This is the problem - real design is hard because it includes ALL the problems and the constraints they create. Too many (I'd say most, in my experience), just focus on the problems they want to solve, ignore the rest, and think they've done a good job, when in fact they completely failed. And the real problem is management that accepts that crap as completed work and pushes it out on the customers.
> The damn "designers" are so infatuated with their "principles" of design and aesthetics that they completely ignore the fact that DESIGN IS SECONDARY TO FUNCTION — if you make it stop working, your design sucks, no matter how good you think it looks.
The original package was created by designers too. It worked, and then, many years later, a second group of designers responded to a new set of requirements with another design, which did not. This is how it goes. Failure is a possibility when you try something new. It's not like there's a foolproof system that works every time, and if you experience a setback it's because you forgot to apply the foolproof system.
On the engineering side, applications and services break all the time. I don't generally a consider it a failure of engineering as a discipline when that happens. Failures can even be caused by mistakes, but that doesn't mean the people involved are stupid or lazy or careless. It's the risk of moving quickly in a complicated world with many overlapping systems. Design and marketing are not spared from this unfortunate truth.
That would have been the fallacy of unjustifiably arguing from the general to the specific. What you have stated are arguments why a company might choose to rebrand. They are not arguments that Tropicana should have done it, and not when it did.
My guess is that the marketing people drank too deeply of their own Kool-Aid, so to speak.
"reconnect with existing consumers and reach out to new ones" is management consultant bullshit like "leverage our synergies to enhance the client experience". It means nothing. TFA did not explain anything.
You also don't "reconnect with existing customers" by changing the brand.
"the brand" is ill-defined. Is it the name "Tropicana" or is it the design of the packaging? In this case, it turned out to be the latter more than the former. There are other cases where the name is retained through a total redesign without this sort of damage.
While I half-agree on the BS level in that quote, in another sense I think it's totally obvious what they meant: consumers who already buy tropicana become inured to the brand identity - a redesign gets them actively thinking about the choice to buy tropicana while shopping; consumers who do not buy tropicana for some vague, non-specific reason may be tempted to try it after the redesign, either because they merely notice the package more, or find it more appealing.
> In this case, it turned out to be the latter more than the former.
That conclusion is not obvious. On the new packaging, the brand is much less visible, all one sees is a big promise about "orange" (like Agent Orange?) so it could be that people were looking for the brand name, and took that opportunity to switch.
The piece suffered from not having nearly enough detail here. Why did they choose that exact moment? What led them to choose the new design no one liked?
I would imagine the fruit juice industry is under some pressure. When I was a kid their product was viewed as a staple breakfast item that was beneficial to your health. These days its reputation is more like soda, too sugary for regular consumption.
Were they really redesigning for vague brand marketing reasons or were they grasping at straws to revive declining sales?
Well sometimes "why" is just to stay current. When I was a kid I thought those dated-looking boxes of "JIFFY" cake mix were actually boxes that nobody had bought and had been sitting there for 30 years.
I mean, as risky and brand and logo redesigns are, there is often a need to want to modernize or revitalize your logo or mark or packaging. It’s more difficult, the larger/older/more iconic your packaging is. That’s why the best logo and branding and packaging redesigns tend to either be the most iterative or have changed early in a product/brand’s lifecycle before he could be too associated with a company.
The Tropicana redesign was a total failure — but there is a story where you could have had a redesign that left essential elements (the orange with the straw at the center), with a slightly updated/modernized logo or typeface, and it could have been successful.
Successful rebrands and redesigns don’t get the same attention as the failures because they are successful. But there are a number that are fairly radical — Airbnb, I was definitely in the camp that hated their new logo and branding at first, but it has worked. Coca-Cola consistently has some of the best adjustments to its logo and packaging, subtle but powerful (New Coke being the exception that absolutely proves the rule). Apple and Microsoft have both had very good redesigns — Apple has used the same logo shape for decades, but it has changed font and color of the logo. Kroger is a more recent example of an exemplary rebrand.
Going too far, and in this case, making your core packaging impossible for buyers to recognize is absolutely a problem and a disaster — but rebranding or updating branding is often a very good thing for a business, especially when it is subtle enough for the consumer to not notice or to just notice that it now looks more elegant or fresher.
Of course it was over-dramatized for effect, and the truth emerges further down the page. But it's close enough to true that it stops and makes you think.
Yes!! I mentioned this meme in another comment because it is also one of my favorites!
Coca-Cola has some of the best branding work of all time. It’s also interesting to see how iconic the branding is even in non-English countries. You can see a Coke logo in any country and know what the product is. It’s just superb.
One of those brands has endured for over 125 years, is today worth over $18 billion dollars, and is the 36th-most valuable company in the world.
The other is Coca-Cola.
Pepsi gets an absolutely undeserved amount of shit[1]. It's one of the most successful companies in the world. It's impressive on every single metric other than "is Coca-Cola." The fact that they can have that level of success while competing head-to-head with one of the most successful brands of all-time ought to be reason for accolades, not insults.
The takeaway that I choose to get from that graphic is that there are multiple paths to success, and one need not imitate the market-leader's strategy.
[1] Except that one logo document. It absolutely deserved all the shit it got for that one.
I'm not sure AirBnB is a good example. Their brand is their name. They aren't a product on a shelf. I'm not sure there is a logo terrible enough to make someone close their website and not book a room.
Well, I think you run the risk of not making the app icon (if there is an app) or logo recognition worse. When Uber changed its logo to the weird map pickup thing from the “U” — it hurt them. That’s not a 1:1, obviously because Uber is much more homescreen reliant than Airbnb is, but that doesn’t mean too can’t have bad internet logo redesigns. To say nothing of terrible website redesigns, which have killed companies before (Digg v4).
Again, I’ve come around on the Airbnb one personally. I think it works now.
To sort of riff off what you're saying; there might be some serious social, "whys" driving the more material, "why" of lackluster brand re-designs in the last 20 years. It seems like as companies are bought up by private equity groups (PAI Partners in Tropicana's case) quality and brand identity suffer. You really see this all over the place and another bad recession could reshuffle the board enough to let private wealth groups buy up what's left of the United States' viable domestic cultural export.
> 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.
Exactly. Unless your brand is in trouble or you are trying to deflect the attention from some sort of scandal the odds of losing existing customers from a successful business is far higher than the odds of attracting new customers because you have changed your packaging.
Because people need more salary/bonuses/consulting fees/resume fodder and will constantly push for it, making up various bullshit to justify it. Sometimes it goes through and a redesign project is started, and once started, it's very hard to turn back while saving face.
I think a lot of times a redesign is simply used as a tool for a manager/exec to have an impact, any impact really. It does not matter so much if the net result is positive or negative. It looks good on their resume. "Joined company X and spearheading redesign project of X". Designer companies love it, they can let their imagination run wild and the managers will gobble up whatever they come up with.
This happens on all levels really. If it is a huge company like Pepsi or Tropicana or for example my high school which "rebranded" and all the students including me had to stamp thousands and thousands of exam paper with the new logo.
> 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.
I ask that to myself every single time I update my mac or pixel 3 phone.
The UX gets worse and worse every year, and just when you finally start to get used to it they decide to change things again.
I guess they need to keep internal teams busy 24/7. I've seen it in many companies, people keep throwing A/B tests, see what seem to improve the experience by negligible amount (most of the time their tests are skewed anyways so it doesn't really matter), then they spent millions and hundreds of man hours to move a few buttons and make a few lines of text bigger/smaller. When they deploy it the impact is either inexistent or negative, people get fired, new managers get hired, and they start again.
>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
If you have a painter on staff shit will get painted. If there's not a lot of shit that really needs painting some shit that doesn't need painting will get painted.
If you keep graphic designers (or better yet, someone who's managing a group of designers) on staff...
While we're at it, please find the numpty that did the redesign of the the Newcastle Brown label, and makes sure they are never allowed to work in graphic design or commercial art ever again.
I thought there was something wrong with the last bottle I had, other than the label, and now I read this:
"Newcastle Brown Ale is no longer available in the United States. A product labelled “Newcastle Brown Ale” is still sold but it is produced by Lagunitas Brewing Company and has little in common with the original product."
Or the geniuses who recently redesigned Vanilla Coke Zero's cans and cartons. The cans are now the exact color of what leaks out of a car with a blown head gasket, where the oil and coolant have mixed.
IMHO the biggest visible difference to me (besides the "straw orange" trademark) is the original one has the brand Tropicana very clearly in the middle, while the redesign puts it in much-less-readable-at-a-glance vertical text on the side. To someone quickly scanning the shelves, the former stands out and immediately tells you it's Tropicana, while the latter would probably tell you only "100% orange" --- fine, it's orange juice, but doesn't say the brand as prominently.
Personally I noticed the brand change but found the new branding so lame that my lizard brain suspected the quality had also gone down. It just wasn't Tropicana anymore.
The new version 100% looks like a generic to me. It’s some kind of orange juice. Likely a store brand.
I agree that lacking the obvious name Tropicana somewhere is a big problem. Maybe if that was still in black and just as prominent as it was on the old carton, the new picture of orange juice might’ve worked.
But if you make your product look like the store brand… what do you expect?
> IMHO the biggest visible difference to me (besides the "straw orange" trademark) is the original one has the brand Tropicana very clearly in the middle, while the redesign puts it in much-less-readable-at-a-glance vertical text on the side.
Yes, that was also the Humble Opinion of the eye-tracking visualization included in the article.
Poorly written article. Says exactly the opposite of what it means several times. Here’s the totally wrong conclusion, for example:
“On the other hand, the new packaging failed to impress the consumers, with clean lines, a lack of visuals, transforming the once indistinguishable orange juice into a “generic store brand” product.”
The orange juice used to be distinguishable, not indistinguishable!
It’s very hard to read articles that are so poorly written that they say the opposite of what they mean and rely on the reader to suss out their actual intent.
It's no accident that popular brand redesigns are usually just fresh coats of paint on their existing visual identity.
Apple: lost the rainbow, same silhouette
Google: still multicolored wordmark, but in a more modern font
BMW: same silhouette, reduced color palette
UPS: same colors and composition, simplified shapes
Brands are worth money they engender loyalty: people become repeat customers from brands they trust. If they don't recognize your brand, why would they choose it?
it is clear that the art director / creative director does not understand visual communication and the changes between the two are drastic and not recognizable
277 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] threadOn the other hand, a UX design tenet is to test, not assume. Just because it sounds right doesn't mean it's the correct explanation (that goes for both TFA and alternative theories).
At the store, I don't see it. I may notice that product with the same name, but the spell is broken, it is no longer the product I mindlessly buy again and again, and it may be a good occasion to try something else. Even worse, I may end up buying competing products that look more like the original design than the new design of the same brand.
I wonder what the legal implications would be of copying a product's old abandoned design? Especially if the original was to revert back?
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.
I’m guessing it’s a picture of their actual juice, but it looks very bland, especially compared to the bright ORANGE color of… an actual orange (or at least, of an over saturated orange).
They also had that ad in the 90's.
https://youtu.be/wUVp3zyqo3s
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!
And the Honey Crisp apple is very new. Even though released in the 1990s, it takes decades for production to grow, and, for other regions to get cultivars and start selling them too.
Then on top of all that, for most people to even know about new apple flavours, it must compete for space at the grocery...
They literally did an eye gaze study showing that just about no one saw the logo (and even fewer read it), yet their conclusion is some emotional fugazi.
"I couldn't find the stuff we normally get, so I bought this one because it was cheaper".
We should be careful with strong words, but in this case they may be appropriate.
https://xkcd.com/993/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Name_(brand)
http://gbnfgroceries.blogspot.com/2014/01/from-misc-foods-ai...
I remember these being an entire aisle in the grocery store in the 80s. I think they've been replaced by store brands with more colorful packaging
[1] https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/1002568447140622336
[2] https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/107433/whats-the-...
Web users: "Welcome to our world."
[1]: https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/0...
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?
My guess is that Pepsi didn't know what they were doing, hired an agency who came on really strong with a ton of bravado about how their instincts trump research and got sold a pile of magic beans.
> "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
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 orange I associated the brand as being as close to pure, fresh orange juice as possible. I was young.
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.
Consumers complained about the packaging.
Sales fell 20% in the two months following the packaging rollout
Sales presumably rose after the packaging was reverted (although I don't see a specific calling out of this).
Presumably the product didn't change (it takes a while for people to notice and respond to a product change anyway). Advertising changed, obviously, but I'd guess the spending stayed the same, or even went up.
You could probably run user studies too, but those weren't reported. Maybe pay for the product to go on the Price Is Right with different branding and see how it affects price guesses, etc.
> And why would you move away from such a strong and heavily advertised image of the straw in the orange?
Yeah I dunno. The cap shaped like an orange was cute, but practically invisible. The glass of orange juice wasn't very distinctive at all.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squash_(drink)
One of the questions pediatricians ask nowadays is do you keep fruit juice in the house, and I believe they ask so that they can advise you to get rid of it or prevent the kids from drinking it.
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 tangerine pulps. Here, I buy fresh tangerine in the supermarket. Sure thing, it takes much longer to squeeze them and clean things up... but the taste is 5 times better.
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 directly when I have time! But the point was about American consumers, who are buying reconstituted concentrate anyways (just that someone's done the reconstituting for them.)
(Which goes to the other point: most store brand orange juice comes from your local Dole, Minute Maid, or Tropicana distribution center, which is bottling/filling the cartons from concentrate. It's all the same supply chain, the only thing that's different is the brand tax.)
Edit: Weakened the claim about how much is from concentrate, because I'm having trouble finding a statistic.
Second edit: I'm wrong, the majority of orange juice sold in the US is NFC. So this is a market distinction I wasn't aware of.
They have different flavor bombs.
Same as branded gas that all comes from the same regional depot with vendor specific additives dumped in the trailer before delivery.
They aren't. Over 90% of orange juice sold in the US is not from concentrate.
Is Tropicana juice different in the US and in the EU?
I've resorted to something similar when making my tangerine juice: I put some water, ice, and a sugar cane "square" in the jar or cups first, and then go to squeeze the juice. By the time I'm over making lunch or dinner, the juice is ready without having to use a spoon to mix it.
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.
Edit: I found a survey from 2009[1] where non-reconstituted orange juice was over 50% of the market. So I'm completely wrong about this!
[1]: https://crec.ifas.ufl.edu/media/crecifasufledu/extension/ext...
It makes me wonder if the frozen concentrate is actually closer to the original orange than the "fresh never concentrated" stuff?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_juice
The problem is there's no motif. It doesn't need the straw orange but it does need some thing.
If you have a hard time distinctly describing it, generally you have a hard time remembering it
So if I liked that brand, and went in and couldn't find that image, I'd probably just pick something at random.
> On the other hand, the new packaging failed to impress the consumers, with clean lines, a lack of visuals, transforming the once indistinguishable orange juice into a "generic store brand" product.
It reminds me of the failed redesign of the JC Penny logo. The new logo was crisp, clean, modern, and was 100% not what their customers were looking for.
https://www.businessinsider.com/jcpenneys-new-logo-2013-5
The news articles were interesting... "Nixon swears he'll never resign". But the old marketing was also fascinating. I had to ask my wife what the ad meant which was advertising "fashion for ladies-in-waiting".
It's funny thinking about that now, because JCPenney just like every other retail big box chain, got rid of all their window displays decades ago. I dunno what they were thinking. It's still not uncommon to drive past a macys and see a giant facade that's mostly painted over because they decided they didn't need window displays.
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?
Management gets bored.
Source: Me, previously a Big Brand Marketing Manager
I think there's incredible value in what they do and part of that is keeping sites from going stale. I believe that in general people get fatigue from seeing the same design day-in, day-out. There's a cost to not changing. Or at least a trade-off.
The risk is when redesign is carte blanche for the design team to do things that they think are pretty without the requisite user testing and data to back up decisions.
Major design changes should come with a nice set of data to support them.
For sites I don't visit as often I likely won't really notice a redesign.
Meanwhile Facebook marketplace is nipping at their feet while they are staying static.
Clearly Craigslist is incredibly profitable and successful, and possibly more profitable in the short term because they aren’t investing, but IMO remaining static means you lose ground eventually.
- a tool?
- a marketing piece?
Redesign for the sake of it is usually bad for the former. It's fine (good?) for the latter.
Major redesigns to marketing pieces (aka, advertisements) are fine. No one spends a long time staring at them anyway.
Major redesigns to tools will annoy the hell out of their users, unless things are done very carefully indeed (or the old tool was indisputably awful). You've got to look at how novices onboard to and use them, how intermediate users use them, how experts use them, and, if you can find one, how a master uses the tool. (The master will probably do something that surprises you. Make sure your redesign does not piss the master off, unless you like firefighting.) That's a lot of work!
Unfortunately, most things in life are tools by this definition, or at least close enough to them.
There is definitely a perception that if the front end of the product is old and hasn’t had a refresh, that it’s probably the same with the rest of the product and it’s sitting in maintenance mode.
But a lot of non techy users get confused very quickly. My family members, and not just older ones, are constantly having problems with app's changing things around, smart smart TV moving things around, apps changing icons etc.
I am usually their first call and I can tell you, that a lot redesigns, even when they are clearly better designs, leave a lot of users confused.
And it annoys me because not only are they usually annoyed when they call, but somehow its my problem. There is a reason why I am on backend. I don't like dealing with users.
I have fallen into that trap myself. I have read about some exciting new tech in a blog and want to try it out in a POC. There may be some excitement around it and suddenly it becomes a MVP and placed into production. Eventually it evolves into "legacy code" that developers hate to touch. The right approach is sometimes to step back, and rewrite the POC in a language/framework that can be supported by others.
Design as a department is very often under resourced and I'd take a strong wager that the designers who actually work for Tropicana were dreading all the unnecessary work this rebrand was surely going to generate for them.
>>Tropicana’s original packaging had rich colours and a strong visual hierarchy. On the other hand, the new packaging failed to impress the consumers, with clean lines, a lack of visuals, transforming the once indistinguishable orange juice into a “generic store brand” product.
This same thing happens in everything else too, such as automotive controls and web design.
The damn "designers" are so infatuated with their "principles" of design and aesthetics that they completely ignore the fact that DESIGN IS SECONDARY TO FUNCTION — if you make it stop working, your design sucks, no matter how good you think it looks.
Whether you make it harder to notice the brand that I've always associated with good fruit juice, harder to find the controls to my automobile by touch while the windshield is fogging with blinding glare of oncoming cars, or just harder to find a common function on your web page/app, IDGAF how aesthetically pleasing, clean, or hip your "design is" — you had one job and you FAILED.
How designers and their teachers and managers can so consistently and massively fail to understand that fundamental concept is just baffling.
Another article [1] indicates that the new design was deployed on January 8th, 2009, and Tropicana announced a return to the old design on February 23rd, 2009.
A quick search shows an article [2] indicating around 2018 was when the panic around plastic straws began (with, for example, Seattle banning plastic straws starting in July 2018).
So in this case, the plastic straw issue does necessarily appear to be related to the redesign.
1: https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2015/05/what-to-learn-fro...
2: https://www.eater.com/2018/7/12/17555880/plastic-straws-envi...
> So in this case, the plastic straw issue does _not_ necessarily appear to be related to the redesign.
I agree with your main point, but I have a small objection to this phrase. I don't think principles of design tells you to not care about usability/function. In fact, a good design is aesthetics AND function, as argued in "The Design of Everyday Things"[1].
So in this case, the designers are simply not doing their job. They've been infatuated with their principles of aesthetics, that they didn't follow the actual principles of design. Which happens when designers blindly copy the latest trend.
The reason I'm bringing this up is that one might interpret the phrase to mean that design is not about function, which isn't fair to many great designers out there.
[1]: https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/Don-Norman/dp/0465050654
Yes, the actual great designers put function first, then solve the now-harder problem of simplifying the aesthetics without sacrificing the function.
Had an architect (trained, licensed, etc.) propose a redesigned front porch and put a support post right square in front of an existing bay window. Sure, from the front elevation view, it looked great, but squarely blocked the view from inside. Also proposed just building the wrap=around part without moving a natgas meter, just left it obstructing part of the side entry. What a waste of time and money - she just solved the problems she wanted to solve (e.g., make it look good in her drawing) and ignored all the other problems - and was proud of that.
This is the problem - real design is hard because it includes ALL the problems and the constraints they create. Too many (I'd say most, in my experience), just focus on the problems they want to solve, ignore the rest, and think they've done a good job, when in fact they completely failed. And the real problem is management that accepts that crap as completed work and pushes it out on the customers.
The original package was created by designers too. It worked, and then, many years later, a second group of designers responded to a new set of requirements with another design, which did not. This is how it goes. Failure is a possibility when you try something new. It's not like there's a foolproof system that works every time, and if you experience a setback it's because you forgot to apply the foolproof system.
On the engineering side, applications and services break all the time. I don't generally a consider it a failure of engineering as a discipline when that happens. Failures can even be caused by mistakes, but that doesn't mean the people involved are stupid or lazy or careless. It's the risk of moving quickly in a complicated world with many overlapping systems. Design and marketing are not spared from this unfortunate truth.
> One of the main reasons for rebranding/redesigning is for brands to reconnect with existing consumers and reach out to new ones.
The notable point here IMO is not "why did they do it?" but "how/why did it fail so badly?"
My guess is that the marketing people drank too deeply of their own Kool-Aid, so to speak.
You also don't "reconnect with existing customers" by changing the brand.
While I half-agree on the BS level in that quote, in another sense I think it's totally obvious what they meant: consumers who already buy tropicana become inured to the brand identity - a redesign gets them actively thinking about the choice to buy tropicana while shopping; consumers who do not buy tropicana for some vague, non-specific reason may be tempted to try it after the redesign, either because they merely notice the package more, or find it more appealing.
That conclusion is not obvious. On the new packaging, the brand is much less visible, all one sees is a big promise about "orange" (like Agent Orange?) so it could be that people were looking for the brand name, and took that opportunity to switch.
I would imagine the fruit juice industry is under some pressure. When I was a kid their product was viewed as a staple breakfast item that was beneficial to your health. These days its reputation is more like soda, too sugary for regular consumption.
Were they really redesigning for vague brand marketing reasons or were they grasping at straws to revive declining sales?
The Tropicana redesign was a total failure — but there is a story where you could have had a redesign that left essential elements (the orange with the straw at the center), with a slightly updated/modernized logo or typeface, and it could have been successful.
Successful rebrands and redesigns don’t get the same attention as the failures because they are successful. But there are a number that are fairly radical — Airbnb, I was definitely in the camp that hated their new logo and branding at first, but it has worked. Coca-Cola consistently has some of the best adjustments to its logo and packaging, subtle but powerful (New Coke being the exception that absolutely proves the rule). Apple and Microsoft have both had very good redesigns — Apple has used the same logo shape for decades, but it has changed font and color of the logo. Kroger is a more recent example of an exemplary rebrand.
Going too far, and in this case, making your core packaging impossible for buyers to recognize is absolutely a problem and a disaster — but rebranding or updating branding is often a very good thing for a business, especially when it is subtle enough for the consumer to not notice or to just notice that it now looks more elegant or fresher.
Of course it was over-dramatized for effect, and the truth emerges further down the page. But it's close enough to true that it stops and makes you think.
Coca-Cola has some of the best branding work of all time. It’s also interesting to see how iconic the branding is even in non-English countries. You can see a Coke logo in any country and know what the product is. It’s just superb.
The other is Coca-Cola.
Pepsi gets an absolutely undeserved amount of shit[1]. It's one of the most successful companies in the world. It's impressive on every single metric other than "is Coca-Cola." The fact that they can have that level of success while competing head-to-head with one of the most successful brands of all-time ought to be reason for accolades, not insults.
The takeaway that I choose to get from that graphic is that there are multiple paths to success, and one need not imitate the market-leader's strategy.
[1] Except that one logo document. It absolutely deserved all the shit it got for that one.
Again, I’ve come around on the Airbnb one personally. I think it works now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAI_Partners
Exactly. Unless your brand is in trouble or you are trying to deflect the attention from some sort of scandal the odds of losing existing customers from a successful business is far higher than the odds of attracting new customers because you have changed your packaging.
There is much more than "this one is better than the other one" (to some random passer-bys)
Because people need more salary/bonuses/consulting fees/resume fodder and will constantly push for it, making up various bullshit to justify it. Sometimes it goes through and a redesign project is started, and once started, it's very hard to turn back while saving face.
This happens on all levels really. If it is a huge company like Pepsi or Tropicana or for example my high school which "rebranded" and all the students including me had to stamp thousands and thousands of exam paper with the new logo.
I ask that to myself every single time I update my mac or pixel 3 phone.
The UX gets worse and worse every year, and just when you finally start to get used to it they decide to change things again.
I guess they need to keep internal teams busy 24/7. I've seen it in many companies, people keep throwing A/B tests, see what seem to improve the experience by negligible amount (most of the time their tests are skewed anyways so it doesn't really matter), then they spent millions and hundreds of man hours to move a few buttons and make a few lines of text bigger/smaller. When they deploy it the impact is either inexistent or negative, people get fired, new managers get hired, and they start again.
If you have a painter on staff shit will get painted. If there's not a lot of shit that really needs painting some shit that doesn't need painting will get painted.
If you keep graphic designers (or better yet, someone who's managing a group of designers) on staff...
"Newcastle Brown Ale is no longer available in the United States. A product labelled “Newcastle Brown Ale” is still sold but it is produced by Lagunitas Brewing Company and has little in common with the original product."
What. The. Fuck.
It tells you people now see 100% orange over seeing Tropicana?
But now that you know that, how do you know seeing 100% orange will lower sales as compared to seeing Tropicana?
I agree that lacking the obvious name Tropicana somewhere is a big problem. Maybe if that was still in black and just as prominent as it was on the old carton, the new picture of orange juice might’ve worked.
But if you make your product look like the store brand… what do you expect?
Yes, that was also the Humble Opinion of the eye-tracking visualization included in the article.
I'm sure they had great support from focus groups though. Decisions like this always do.
“On the other hand, the new packaging failed to impress the consumers, with clean lines, a lack of visuals, transforming the once indistinguishable orange juice into a “generic store brand” product.”
The orange juice used to be distinguishable, not indistinguishable!
It’s very hard to read articles that are so poorly written that they say the opposite of what they mean and rely on the reader to suss out their actual intent.
Apple: lost the rainbow, same silhouette
Google: still multicolored wordmark, but in a more modern font
BMW: same silhouette, reduced color palette
UPS: same colors and composition, simplified shapes
Brands are worth money they engender loyalty: people become repeat customers from brands they trust. If they don't recognize your brand, why would they choose it?