Case Study - Tropicana

Case Study – Tropicana Pack Redesign
Lucas Martinez Agulha

1-What were the marketing and business objectives for the Tropicana pack change?
Companies always have to innovate somehow in their products; in the packaging, in the formula, in the taste or in the marketing campaigns. If a company doesn’t do that others will, and competition will become stronger and gain points in the market. So, Tropicana invested 35 million dollars in an advertising campaign and hired the agency Arnell to create the new packaging and campaign to promote the new orange juice, which was the best-selling product of the brand. They wanted to increase sales with a new modern design and attractive campaign, with a new logo and a new slogan. But they failed; they lost sales and money, and the competitors took advantage and gained points in the market.

2-What were the elements of the pack that should have remained the same – not changed?
Tropicana redesigned their packaging but they didn’t realize that the consumers had an emotional bond with the old packaging, mainly with some specific elements: the orange with the straw, the logo design and “Pure Premium”. The orange with the straw had been in the packaging for a long time and it was an outstanding element of the packaging. The logo design is a characteristic that helps consumers to identify the brand and it is an important feature that creates a relationship between the packaging and the consumer. The focus on “Pure Premium” transmitted to the consumers trust and quality, so when they changed the focus to “100% Orange Juice” the consumers felt they were buying a cheap juice, not the juice they always trusted. These changes on the packaging could be less extreme and done in other occasions, but they changed all this elements at once, what initiated another big problem: with the extreme makeover of the packaging, the product became unrecognizable on the shelves, so even the most passionate consumer couldn’t easily identify the product.

3-What were the key consumer complaints as a result of the pack redesign? How do you think Tropicana missed this in their consumer research?
The majority of the comments about the new packaging said it was “ugly”, “stupid” or “stinky”. But the packaging wasn’t ugly, stupid or stinky. The consumers felt this way because the brand removed the characteristics that they were attached to. They created a relationship with the packaging and its elements; the orange with the straw, the logo design and the slogan “Pure Premium”. And the removal of these features caused the furious of the consumers that could no longer recognize the brand and the juice they always loved. This should be noticed on the consumer research before launching the new packaging. The company underestimated the emotional bond that the consumers had with the packaging. Tropicana focused on redesign the elements of the packaging to turn it more modern and attractive. But they didn’t realize that the aesthetic attractiveness is much less important than the emotional attractiveness; and the consumers loved and trusted the orange with the straw, the old logo and the old slogan. This is attractive to them, even if the characteristics of the new packaging were aesthetically more attractive. So I think that Tropicana focused their consumer research in the aesthetic aspects of the packaging and forgot about the emotional aspect.

4-What type of consumer testing would you recommend to test the pack changes? Outline in detail.
I would recommend doing depth interviews with all kind of consumers of the juice and ethnography tests. The depth interviews can be done face to face or online; the moderator would observe the behavior of the respondent when is proposed the new packaging and see how he would interact with it. The behavior in question includes body language, facial expressions, voice tone and packaging handling. Analyzing all these elements for different kinds of consumers can give great conclusions about the new packaging. The ethnography is an observation research in which consumers can be observed while they’re shopping. In this test you can assess how people interact with the new packaging and how the packaging communicates with the consumer in the shelf between other products.

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