Anyone is surprised by this? People voted with their wallets. Tropicana took a widely recognized brand and made it look like everyone else. Big mistake.

My husband (who doesn't read Consumerist) came home from the grocery store complaining about how "stupid" the new carton looked.

My primary reaction, upon seeing the packaging, is that the new screw-off cap looked JUST LIKE A PENIS HEAD.

I still think the little orange cap is a-dorable.

they just put the cute cap on the old package... marketing people "think" too much.

I wonder if they can get their money back from the marketing company.

I just read the Newsweek article profiling Peter Arnell (the guy who created their new logo):

[www.newsweek.com]

I can't figure out which attribute I find most endearing - his inability to accept negative criticism, arrogance, or past employee abuse.

I still don't get this. I'm a designer, I thought their design was cool. I don't see how it looks like "everyone else"

@Eyebrows McGee (on Twitter: LPetelle): If your husband's penis has an orange head, he might want to see a doctor ;-)

@theblackdog: ROTFLMAO

First time I saw the new packaging I had to look twice to determine that it was the premium product. Packaging looks more generic & cheaper. The old packaging looked premium, and I couldn't imagine spending the money to improve it when that would render it at least temporarily less recognizable to their customers.

@Oranges w/ Cheese: I'm not sure where your quoted phrase is from, but the complaints I saw were that it resembled the packaging on the house brand/generic, and that was certainly true of the Publix brand somebody posted a picture of.

It's kind of a moot point now, since it doesn't really matter why it resulted in a sharp sales decline; the fact that it did means it's over.

"His most prominent clients include (from left) DKNY, PepsiCo (which owns Tropicana) and ConEdison."

So, was the new terrible Pepsi logo his fault too?

@Eyebrows McGee (on Twitter: LPetelle): Orange penis head?
May want to have him lay off the cheetos and the porn. :p

I personally didn't like their new boxes since I had to spend 5 more minutes trying to hunt what I wanted down. :(

My problem with the redesign was that there are like 20 different varieties of Tropicana OJ, and you couldn't easily tell them apart.

@Oranges w/ Cheese: I'm not a professional designer by any means, but I liked the new design a lot, too.

Wouldn't customers taking their business to other brands be considered a form of a complaint?

@Oranges w/ Cheese: Go to the store and scan the shelves with your eyes. Don't look specifically for it, but just look for something that "stands out" from the rest. Believe me you wont see it. An orange with a straw in it did.
Don't get me wrong it doesn't look bad, but it's pretty plain even if it's technically attractive.

@Oranges w/ Cheese: It looked fine, but was horrible at showing me which stupid kind of orange juice to buy. I didn't have a problem with the old carton or between kinds of other brands and there's no way in hell I'm going to stop buying orange juice drunk just to read their stupid cartons.

@Applekid: You must not have read the article: yes it was his fault.

Until I saw this followup I was wondering if making it look like a generic store brand was actually intentional. I wondered if Tropicana was worried that in a tough economy people would switch to a cheaper store brand, and was hoping that inattentive shoppers would pick up their new package by mistake.

So much for that theory...

FWIW I first saw the new design in the store after reading the story here... and I still didn't realize it was Tropicana, not the store brand, until I looked closely.

@webwbr:

Perfect use of quotations.

@josh1701: Exactly, I didn't mind the look of the carton, just the fact that it was horrible at giving me the information I wanted.

@Oranges w/ Cheese: I didn't think it looked like everyone else, nearly so much as all the varieties of their product looked way too similar. A quick scan wasn't enough to find the one i wantd, so I moved to Simply Orange and got what I wanted.

I thought the desing was pretty, but it wasn't functional.

@Oranges w/ Cheese: @KyleOrton: Nor should you have to.

@Oranges w/ Cheese: The elements of the design were okay (I liked the more modern text look), but the layout was horrible IMO. Not only did it look like every other brand, but you could tell the flavors apart. People are particular when it comes to their orange juice.

@tedyc03: If it looked like everybody else it wouldn't be a problem. What Tropicana did was take a unique, easily identifiable label and make it generic, sterile and dull. Did I mention sterile?

In addition to their rebranding, a year or so ago they started using mostly Brazilian oranges instead of 100% Florida oranges. The taste difference is subtle, but noticable. It used to set them apart, and now their 'pure premium' tastes like the rest and costs more. The rebranding also brought this out that they are not the old Tropicana anymore.

@josh1701: Same here. It made it much harder to tell the different levels of pulp apart.

@Oranges w/ Cheese: It wasn't just a design change. They simultaneously changed the names of their different grades (ie Lots Of Pulp to High Pulp) and the associated color coding scheme. They took the reflex action of reaching for Tropicana and made it confusing.

@Oranges w/ Cheese: I'm a designer too and I thought that it was pretty bad. It was bland, and didnt pass the "can i spot it across the room" test. Also, they made the pulp/no pulp hard to spot, which is one of the main purchasing decisions for the brand.

I think the flat orange color combined with the white made it look a lot more generic than the iconic 3d orange/straw

I wonder how much their sales dropped in LA? They had been one of the big advertisers on the annoying supergraphics ads that have been appearing all over town the last few months. I don't buy much OJ, but if I did I wouldn't buy theirs just because they have been at least partially responsible for the ads.

@Eyebrows McGee (on Twitter: LPetelle): I thought I was the only one.

The new Tropicana carton was so generic looking that it was easy to miss in the large selection of juices. If customers didn't see the big green lettering with its characteristic orange with the straw stuck through it they probably assumed their store didn't have Tropicana so they bought the other brand.

@Eyebrows McGee (on Twitter: LPetelle): Good, I'm not the only one who noticed.

@Oranges w/ Cheese: If you have it right in front of your face it does look kind of cool. Try looking at it from 6 feet away among other oj cartons. It is impossible to see it. The transparent graphics just fade away at a distance. Even the orange of the juice does not stand out. The sideways tropicana is almost impossible to read at a distance. I would have assumed the a big dog type design firm would have taken something like where a product is viewed into account.

Im all for them changing back. But now that Im sufficiently annoyed by the new packaging, Ive started to buy other brands.

Exactly why they are changing back, but Im not going to change back to buying theirs.

@czetie: Maybe it was intentional, and it backfired.

@Oranges w/ Cheese: What I saw in the new design was the generic/store brand. It would have been better to just print ORANGE JUICE in block black letters on a plain white carton. At least that would have caught *some* attention when people picked it up to wonder what the hell it was.

@tedyc03: Exactally: not buying the product is, effectively, the biggest complaint a consumer can make.

@MrsLopsided: It seems like they dropped the amount of pulp in the 'High Pulp' vs. the previous Grovestand branding.

I enjoyed being able to chew my OJ; I still can, just not quite as much.

not buying your product is the ultimate "customer complaint".

@Oranges w/ Cheese: This is what is wrong with current design trends. The consensus among designers seems to be that sans-serif fonts, arcs, waves, and text integrated into the overall image make good design. It's not their fault, it's what they were taught. When you want to impress a board of executives or professors, those elements are effective because those people are creatively bankrupt and completely out of touch with real consumers. Just think, what conveys an image about your product to the most potential customers regardless of language, education level, or aesthetic tastes: an orange with with a straw stuck in it or part of a glass of juice that could be from any producer?

When you're making your "clever" little little ego-stroking business cards, knock yourself out. When you're trying to sell a daily-use product to millions of people, don't make them look at 6 different places on the carton to get the information they want about your product. So-called sophisticates may mock the Jolly Green Giant, the Betty Crocker spoon, and Charlie Tuna, but you don't know anyone who doesn't know those icons. They created unmistakable brand-awareness for decades, and that is getting harder and harder to find. The new Tropicana packaging could have easily had Publix, Bloom, or Home Economist on it and no one would have known the difference or cared. It has no identity. Queue the sad trombone for Madison Avenue yet again.

I don't think it's about whether the new (or should I now say old?)design looks generic or not. I think it's more about removing the iconic symbol from the packaging.

I highly doubt too many people confused it for generic juice. But I think it's possible that some thought that maybe their store no longer carried Tropicana or was out, so they grabbed something else.

The whole idea of removing the orange/straw symbol was so stupid in the first place. Every company wants their product to have a symbol that is easily identifiable by millions. Why walk away from that? Obviously, they realize what a dumb idea it was.

I just wonder how long it will take for them to recover. Now that so many people have tried a new juice, maybe they will decide to stick with their new brand rather than switch back to Tropicana.

@Applekid:

THREE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS.

This was a new-coke move so that they could increase the proportion of Brazilian oranges in their juice and have fewer people notice.

I don't know that...I just figure it's one of those "what do you get when you mix a spoonful of shit into a barrel full of ice cream -- a barrel full of shit" situations.

Oh, and Florida's Natural gaining also coincided with them starting to advertise more prominently that they use only American oranges. (Yes, there is a difference.) They're the only major brand that still does. (AFAIK, Tropicana Pure Premium used to as well)

@richcreamerybutter:

Those in the auto industry are beside themselves in regards to his relationship and level of influence on Bob Nardelli and his work with Chrysler. Tropicana is not his first miss. He flopped miserably with Chrysler in the early part of the 2000's. It was his idea to try and convince people that the Chrysler brand was upscale and on par with Lexus, BMW, Audi, etc. That included the use of Celine Dion in ads and backing her shows at Ceaser's Palace. Of course no one bought it and the whole campaign crashed and burned. And now he is back at Chrysler wielding more power than he should.

@Chumas: Paul and Storm fan, by any chance?

I thought the sideways and upside-down "Tropicana" lettering was a major loser. When I looked at the carton, all I saw was 100% juice and nothing else until I forced myself to look more closely. I guess that's what happened in the store, too, only people just moved on instead of reading the sideways words. What were they thinking?

@ashabanapal: I actually switched maxipad brands because my preferred brand kept changing packaging and made it IMPOSSIBLE to tell one product from the next, so it took me ten freaking minutes to figure out if it was ultra-thin with wings overnight or whatthehellever I was trying to find.

Never looked back. I think the ones I use now are slightly less comfortable, but IT DOESN'T TAKE TWENTY MINUTES OUT OF MY LIFE TO FIND THEM.