Out with the New, Back in with the Old
A couple weeks ago, Kirsten posted about PepsiCo's redesign of the Tropicana brand. NY Times reported yesterday that, due to public demand, PepsiCo is discontinuing the new design in favor of its previous packaging featuring the orange with the straw stuck into it. Executives within the Tropicana organization were swayed to return to the original packaging when they discovered that consumers had a genuine emotional connection to the original look and felt that the new design looked "generic" and less distinctive.
3 comments:
I'm torn on this one. The old design was decent by supermarket clutter standards, but pretty predictable and not very distinctive from other brands. It was nice to see them try something new, though I wasn't in love with the new design either. I hope this story doesn't scare packaging designers from taking risks, packaging is usually pretty boring and needs some shake-ups, sadly Tropicana just didn't quite nail it with their new design. It doesn't help that it tied into Pepsi's new branding, which as a whole is a huge failure to begin with, and an even more damaging prospect in making a case for fresh, simplified design.
Bryan's got some good points. The 'new' Tropicana look was something you'd see on perhaps a tv show; just didn't have weight.
I've never heard of a product going back to it's old look; or maybe I'm just blindly forgetting something?
It may have not been a complete stunner on its own, but the design total does what every client I've dealt with wants their package to do... Stand out. If you see it in the store, it totally pops and in contrast shows how alike every other orange juice container just looks like the one next to it. The clean design also made it quite legible from far away. It strikes me as odd that Pepsico would turn around on this design, especially considering all the bad press the new identity for Pepsi is getting.
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