Tropicana Scraps New Carton Design

[Caitlin McGrath]

Chowhounds weren't the only ones outraged by the new carton design and loss of the orange-with-straw logo.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/bus...

[rochfood]

They did however keep the cool orange shaped cap.

[Midlife]

Any mention in all of this about the standard marketing practice of focus groups and mall-based questioning that I thought all large brands would do before a major change like this???

My daughter is a brand manager in the wine industry and I doubt her company would make such a change without a whole lot of testing ahead of time. Was this a New Hampshire primary swing????

[Ruth Lafler]

Yup. If you read the article, the company did all the market research, and somehow missed that the people who cared, *really* cared.

[Midlife]

The quote I found is “What we didn’t get was the passion this very loyal small group of consumers have. That wasn’t something that came out in the research.”

I'm sure they did "research". PepsiCo isn't a novice at this stuff. I just wondered about some of the details. This is a pretty big deal in a world where they usually have these things down to the last 'gnat's eyelash'.

[Ruth Lafler]

And yet, there are blunders. The whole process of conducting market research distorts the results, since merely asking questions makes people think about something differently then they would have normally. I'm guessing that the real issue wasn't that the *customers* were unhappy, but that the *company* wasn't happy that customers were perceiving their product as more generic and having trouble picking it out on the shelf.

[HillJ]

At quick glance the new design made it difficult to distinguish btwn the O.J. and the grapefruit juice. A dear friend (75 years old) had forgotten her glasses and asked me if I would go to the grocery store to switch the variety for her. She picked up grapefruit when she intended to purchase O.J. I'm sure she was not alone.

[Kajikit]

It made it very hard to tell the different varieties of juice apart... they all look the same until you read the fine print, and they used to be different colours. It's hard enough finding the plain orange juice rather than the one with added fiber/calcium/anti-oxidants etc etc without having to peer at every label on the shelf twice over.

[HillJ]

My point exactly, Kajikit! Why go thru the trouble of making juice in 5 diff styles but repackage them in identical cartons?

[LabRat]

I thought the new packaging made it look like a generic store brand rather than a familiar national name brand. It sounds bad, but since the cartons looked generic I didn't pay enough attention to them for weeks to actually look at the carton and see that it was Tropicana. I just grabbed a brand whose cartons I was familiar with and went along on my merry way. I wasn't outraged, just inattentive.

[coney with everything]

People had a "deep emotional bond" with the original packaging?

Jeebus Christmas, give me a break.

People were annoyed that the new package was hard to read, or were sick of overpaid marketing weasels who have to make changes just to prove they should be paid. Or having orange juice sold to them based on "breathtaking design strategy".

[ccbweb]

The only thing in the whole process that caused me any concern is that it did, in fact, appear that many people were outraged about a packaging change for orange juice in the supermarket. We've totally lost the handle, as a society, on what it is and is not appropriate to feel outrage about and toward.

Good work for those who wanted their oj packaging back the way it was, though. I am impressed at the speed with which they were able to achieve that.

[alkapal]

who was "outraged" about the design change? i don't recall that here on chowhound.....

[LNG212]

That's funny - I posted this too. I put it at the end of the original thread ( http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/586850 ). I was surprised that the article only mentioned emails and letters to Tropicana and not places like CH where people were disecting every aspect of that design.

[Caitlin McGrath]

Companies respond to feedback they receive directly from consumers. Since this direct feedback is what led Tropicana to retreat, it's not too surprising that the NY Times's ad beat didn't chase down internet-expressed outrage (vs. a reporter looking for attitudes about a product change in order to write a story). The lesson for all the upset chowhounds who bitched on the Tropicana thread: talk back to the company, don't just vent online. Not there's anything wrong with venting online.

[lucyis]

Good catch, Caitlin. I skipped the bus. news today. It's funny that the first time i realized that big orange thing on the carton was a glass of o.j. was in this article. Hear that sound? that's ad execs clearing their desks and looking for new jobs.

[Ruth Lafler]

Good. Companies working with marketers and designers need to remember that they have a vested interest in selling them a new design, and that designers are by nature more interested in new designs than tried and true ones. The whole advertising industry is based on the idea that what you have isn't as good as what they're trying to sell you, and their own product is no exception.