You’ve probably heard about the horrible disaster that was Tropicana’s redesign of the packaging of their Pure Premium orange juice. No? Well, it was a horrible disaster. Their sales dropped 20% in two months, while their competition’s sales rose by double-digits. Oops!
The outcry from design nerds on the Internet was severe, and the company abandoned the redesign a mere two months after they launched it, costing them tens of millions of dollars.
And if you think THAT’s interesting, check out this video of the Peter Arnell, the designer who created the new packaging, defending his company’s concept.
Sorry, no embed. Click image to watch.
It’s hard to imagine how consumers didn’t connect with the new design’s obvious homage to the love between a mother and child, and how the plastic cap’s squeeziness is just like an orange’s squeeziness, and is also pure, like an orange. It’s a pure orange cap that you can squeeze! But for some reason, everyone was all fixated on how ugly the whole thing was and they just missed the deeper symbolism of the word “squeeze” and how emotionally powerful it all is. Duh.
At least they’re retaining the cap. That’s where the real power of love can be felt, anyway.
UPDATE: More amazing info on this Arnell guy can be found in this Newsweek profile, including his discussion of perimeter oscillations, the Parthenon, and the gravitational pull of a Pepsi can in a 27-page memo.
You can’t go wrong with Helvetica.
Oh, wait….
You can’t trust a man with those frames. First it’s “let’s go generic 1990’s Euro packaging even though we’ve got brand recognition”, next it’s “let’s see what’s inside this arc.”
Oh, dear, that poor man. The frames, the structured cardigan, the hyper-bleached teeth, the conceptual strain. Bob Balaban has a hapless evil twin.
@3 beat me to it — Bob Balaban’s most inept character ever. And his little speech — the homilies about “squeeze” and “love”, the “journey”, the firehose of bullshit — makes me want to punch him. And break his glasses. And I’m a glasses-wearing dork myself.
Once Pepsico kicks him to the curb he could easily get a job as an architect here in Seattle – he has their lingo (and look) down pat.
Haven’t watched the video nor am I am OJ drinker but I will just say that package has “depressing early ’80’s lower east side NYC community center signage” all over it. If that makes you nostalgic I guess it would work. or, I s’pose, if you are one of those people who affects a nostalgia for early ’80’s depressio-type aesthetics.
Otherwise, it just makes me feel like some earnest social worker just told me I could be anything I wanted to be but then sadly shook her head when my back was turned.
So it’s got “evocative” going for it, I guess.
Those cartons of the abandoned design are going to be such rare, valuable collectibles in a few decades.
la.catholique for president.
The problem is it looks like a generic grocery store brand
The real question is, will this implosion look as good as “ran the New Coke campaign” on his resume?
And 100% orange sounds like a trick – they backed away from saying 100% orange juice to just promising it’s all one color. Slippery!
Seems pretty obvious to me. The new design screams “generic”. It does absolutely nothing to leverage their brand even going out of it’s way to diminish it almost. Consumers have established a connection with their old design, they buy it every couple of days, they don’t even pay attention to the name anymore, just the look, the colors, the logo. If you are going to be successful, you need to leverage this familiarity yet tweak it in such a way that the piques the curiosity of the consumer making even regular buyers stop and examine new design that they are instantly familiar even if they’ve never seen it.
They probably would have been just fine if they just kept their old brand name logo and kept it horizontal. Pulling a double whammy of logo/name change and a total design change was probably a bad idea.
Judging from his other work, they’re just lucky he didn’t rename the company “trpcn”. Man seriously doesn’t like vowels.
Hard to simply blame a designer for a bad design. Did Pepsico even bother to test the carton outside of their cocoon? The reactions here in comments is immediately what I thought: Looks like a generic. Geesh. Would have taken about $50 in testing to figure that out.
The generic comment is spot on. It looks exactly like a store brand.
It’s amazing how, having never met him, I instantly hate that man. I think it had to do with the use of the term “messaging” and referring to the design process as a “journey”…
ha – i bought that because i didn’t realize it was tropicana!
Ok, get ready to flame me. I have to say it. You know what the new design is? Ready? Yeah…it’s gay…it’s totally gay.
I mean if the guy in the glasses doesn’t give it away, the knob on top should. Is there anything wrong with that? Nope, unless you want to piss off your audience. Orange juice is the one health food that steak eating, beer swilling dudes are willing to guzzle down (from the container of course).
But it has to have a big, ripe, juicy, orange on it. Because that looks like a nice, ripe, juicey…well, fill in the blanks.
The cap is a pretty good idea, I’ll admit. The packaging gaffe though, makes me think Arnell has never purchased, or probably even drank, orange juice.
Am I the only person who totally loved the new design? Although I kind of hate the new caps. Now I have nothing.
What’s this corporate windbag pull down a year? $750,000? Sometimes I hate this country…
http://gawker.com/news/evil-bosses/new-y…
the best part is the comments. this man is almost beyond belief.
My favorite: ‘he had (among his army of personal assistants) a “Hot Beverage Assistant” and a “Cold Beverage Assistant.” ‘
Got to say, the new design just screams: urban, gay sophisticate.
Somebody should have told him that wearing the Jerry Lewis “Nutty Professor” teeth to a press conference probably wasn’t a good idea…
Anyone care to comment on Arnell’s mic style in the first few minutes of the video?
I’d like to comment but I am literally at a loss for words to sum it up.
I read in Newsweek that everyone thought it was generic and that they couldn’t find Tropicana on the shelves! Also Newsweek reported that he eats twenty oranges a day, which have turned his hands orange.
Orange you glad they changed it back?
Design shouldn’t have some elaborate backstory when it is hawking consumer products.
ALL of Pepsico’s new logos scream generic… from the Pepsi to the Tropicana to the Gatorade…. they’ve lost their identity to some terrible 80’s agency! – not that I really care for any of Pepsico’s products but….
I liked the new design, but I’m also boring, so that’s not saying much.
The worst part is at the store trying to decode the stripe across the top of the packaging to determine which of the 14 different types of Tropicana is in the carton. Is it orange juice? Is it orange-tangerine juice? What is calcium free orange juice? Do I need calcium in my orange juice? Don’t I get enough calcium from the milk in my cereal? Am I getting too much calcium? Does this carton have pulp? Or is it pulp free? Christ, I have a master’s degree and it’s too much for me to decipher. I just want orange juice, I don’t want to buy into a lifestyle.
this is Exhibit A in the indictment of business by consultant. This is the same kind of idiotic corporate decision that led Philip Morris to become Altria, or whatever it is now (I can’t remember), and the Yellow Pages to become Dex. What’s wrong with the old package? “It only showed the outside of the orange”??????? Who at Pepsi was sitting in the room when this Arnell guy tried out that line? There’s design, and there’s fraud.
I’ll admit it: I’m pissed that Arnell and his ilk make more money than I do.
With the old twist tops, were we all unconsciously associating purple nurples with our juice?
I like Florida’s Natural better anyway.
I was at my parents’ house a couple months ago and saw this carton in their fridge. My dad always gets Tropicana, so I was puzzled as to why he got this other brand of orange juice, but I didn’t think much of it. It wasn’t until I went to get orange juice myself some weeks later that I realized it WAS Tropicana. Nothing that made the Tropicana brand distinctive was in the new packaging at all. The logo went generic, the juicy orange was gone. It doesn’t take a genius to see that they fucked up. I’m just surprised their sales dropped as much as it did, a good lesson about how important branding is.
you’re all crazy. i always hated that stupid orange with the straw in it. it always seemed insanely cheesy to me. i bought a carton of the newly designed product a week ago, not even realizing that i was only receptive to buying tropicana that time b/c i wasn’t staring at a violated piece of produce. so the design got to me.
but i only buy OJ 2-3 times a year when i am jonesing for a mimosa, so i’m probably not the guy they should be marketing to. so it’s back to the violated orange, and i’ll go back to buying Florida Natural again for my 1 gallon/yr OJ habit.
and for the record, per #24, i am urban, gay and sophisticated. and per #everybody, i love generic design. so they hit their mark.. their mark just happens to be people who don’t buy OJ. whoops.
Has anyone else noticed this guy is a textbook sociopath? Seriously. Compare the comments in the Newsweek article with any symptomatic description of sociopathy. They’re virtually identical.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who hated the redesign — between that and the price increases, I switched to Florida Natural.
@38: Based on my short tenure in the industry, I think working in advertising or marketing sort of requires you to be a sociopath…
I didn’t even realize that was a glass of orange juice on the carton until just now. I just thought it was an ugly semi-oval thing. I always buy the Florida Natural too, just because I want to support farmers here, not in God knows where else.
While we’re at it can we talk about Pepsi’s new logo/campaign…really “pOp” where ‘O’ is a rendition of ObamaCo’s brand…now there’s soda with real change.
I sat through an eerily similar pitch from an ad exec last week for a branding campaign. Those guys are all the same.
Fnarf, do you need a personal average of one comment per 10 or something? Why do you keep coming back and adding another thought? Makes one think you’ve nothing better to do than troll blogs all day.
Given the backlash, doesn’t it make you wonder why Tropicana decided to embark on a redesign to begin with, never mind the result? If everyone’s coming out now and saying that they really identified with the old brand, what was even the impetus for changing it?
@43, have you seen him? He’s the definition of “Internet Troll/Internet Personality”
I am apparently the one person who liked this change. Oh well. Now you can go back to needing an actual orange on the package to identify it. The word “orange” and a big glass of what is clearly orange juice I guess is not enough.
Helvetica caused the Vietnam War. This man, by extension, is a war criminal.
Simple, sleek, elegant design like this only works for luxury goods; hence the success with brands like DKNY. The same approach doesn’t work for grocery products, partly because customers aren’t buying sophistication at the grocery store… they want comfort and deliciousness, hence why grocery branding is often times very cartoonish and colorful.
I suspect that he would have found similar failure in the Pepsi re-branding if not for the massive amount of marketing Pepsico threw behind it- without forcing the new logo down people’s throats with billboards and TV-spots, there’s no association with the established brand.
I’d also add that the shelf life of Pepsi vs Tropicana probably also affected public perception- with Pepsi, we had (and still have) old cans and bottles sitting next to the new packaging, which eases consumers into the new look gradually. With Tropicana and orange juice’s short shelf life, you had a sudden and universal switch in packaging (and the alienation of loyal consumers).
Isn’t it amazing how much difference packaging narcissim can make?
The stuff inside’s the same. Food profits revolving around fashion instead of quality is surely a sign of disease deep in the bone.