OMG WTF

Unless you’ve been in a cave for the last few months, you’ve probably heard of the Tropicana rebrand controversy. It all started when PepsiCo, the parent company of Tropicana decided to go through with a brand overhaul for their Tropicana property. There are many legitimate reasons for doing so, most of the ROI-based ones probably are rooted in generating excitement for the product.

Features of the new brand:
• New cap that you can squeeze off (like an orange!)
• Beautiful photography of the juice (yay?)
• San-serif typography including new logo type treatment
• New advertising campaign to go with it that includes black and white typography and non-traditional family groupings (like father and daughter)

The Audacity of Freshness

Doing advertising for a iconic, trusted and established brand can be tricky. Think of Smucker’s Jam commercials as a good example. The iconic image for most people is — the jar topped with the picnic table-cloth plaid lid that invokes images of farm, small-town life (and freshness by extension). Their commercials with the Smucker’s kid in it reinforces that image with sentimental concepts of trust, loyalty and values. The basic premise of the commercial I’m referring to is the kid’s name is Smucker’s so that means he can really grow up to be one thing… working in his family’s business. It’s a decent commercial because it reinforces their basic public image. You can imagine it would be very difficult for them to decide to leave that comfort zone.

Squeezed

So that was the dilemma that Tropicana faced. They probably saw orange juice as a product with high potential with the current trendy green/oragnic infatuation. Growing this sudden trend and branching out to more diverse and varied demographics requires a more modern and flexible (if not generic) language they can speak in to hopefully reach those segments. Their new “Squeeze” campaign brainchild featuring dads hugging their daughters imagery is indicative of that. It allows much more flexibility in marketing communications. We’ve seen very little so far but I can easily see the campaign grow in 5 years to imagery of an adopted child in a traditional atomic family set to appeal to a certain liberal population and nobody would bat an eye at it.

FTW

What they didn’t bargain for however was how iconic the old Tropicana brand was (is). Not only that, from a design standpoint — the design was very functional and had been grocery store battle tested for decades. Consumers were vocal, spoke out on the internet and PepsiCo decided to revert back to the old with the exception of the cap. My personal opinion is it worked out for the best. Tropicana was probably not respected for being an iconic brand the way Coca-Cola, Ford, FedEx and IBM are. NOW IT IS. Consumers made that argument and came to that conclusion by themselves, so it’s a very pure form of loyalty and love they showed for Tropicana. That’s a victory in my book.

Can’t Help Looking When You Drive By Accidents

• Stuart Elliott of the New York Times writes that the internet had a lot to do with fueling the outrage as Facebook and Twitter users sounded off.
• I first saw Peter Arnell defend the Tropicana rebrand via the fine and dandy folks at logo design love.
• The talented Matt Brown sounds off with his coverage as well — I agree with him on how critical other creatives often are.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 8th, 2009 at 6:48 pm and is filed under Branding, Design, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.