Tropicana redesigned its carton and shoppers could no longer find it

In January 2009 PepsiCo launched new packaging for Tropicana Pure Premium, the leading orange juice brand in the United States. The redesign, by the Arnell Group, removed the image that had sat on the carton for years: an orange pierced by a straw. In its place came a close-up of a glass of juice, a new vertical logo and a cap shaped like half an orange. The aim, as reported at the time, was a more modern and premium look.

Customers wrote and called to complain, and many said the new carton looked like a store brand. Industry data reported by Advertising Age showed unit sales down about 20% between the start of January and late February, while competing brands gained. On February 23 the company announced that the old design would return. The new pack had been on shelves for less than two months.

A shopper does not read the carton

Juice is bought in seconds, from a chilled shelf crowded with similar cartons. Few people stop to study a label. They look for a shape and a color they already know, reach, and move on. The orange with the straw did that work. It told the shopper this is the one you buy before any word was read, and it carried a promise about the product as well: fresh fruit, squeezed, almost straight into your glass.

In our method this is an asset: something distinctive, built over years, that turns into money. Companies tend to count their assets in factories and patents. Some of the ones that pay every day live in the customer’s head instead, as a mark, a color, a habit of recognition. The redesign treated the pack as a surface to refresh, and in doing so it threw away the map shoppers used to find the product.

Every detail on a pack is proof

The glass of juice was a reasonable image on paper. On the shelf it looked generic, and generic is the visual language of private labels. That explains why the complaints came so quickly: shoppers read a cheaper product into a carton whose contents had not changed.

When customers cannot test quality at the moment of purchase, every visible detail becomes a sample of it. There are no neutral details. The straw in the orange was a small, constant proof of the “pure” in Pure Premium. Removing it removed evidence, and the premium price stayed on the shelf with less to support it.

Change one thing at a time

Brands have to evolve, and the question behind the redesign (how do we look current?) was legitimate. The trouble was the size of the move. The image, the logo and the cap all changed together, so loyal buyers had nothing familiar left to hold on to. The rule we apply to the evolution of values works for visual identity too: keep a base, replace one element per cycle, and let the familiar parts carry the customer through the change. You can rebuild a ship plank by plank, as long as you never swap every plank in the same night.

A useful exercise before any redesign is to list the elements customers use to find you, ideally from watching them in store, and decide which of them stay fixed. Once you know which parts are load-bearing, you can move the rest with far less risk.

What the reversal shows

The speed of the U-turn is the most instructive part of the case. PepsiCo read the sales data and the complaints and reversed within weeks, before the loss could settle into a habit of buying another brand. A shopper who switches on a shelf can stay switched, and every extra month on the new pack would have given competitors more time to keep the customers they had picked up.

If you are about to redesign a pack, a logo or a store, start by mapping what your customers already use to recognize you; it is one of the first things we look at in what we do, well before a brief reaches a designer.