Orange you glad Tropicana gave everyone something to talk about this week by rolling the dice on another packaging change?
The scrapped carafe-shaped container certainly met Jenni Romaniuk’s distinctive asset criteria, which means a change this significant exposes the brand to the risk of being more difficult to locate at the point of sale. The result of not being easily found is, of course, being replaced by a competing salient brand that is. However, since the brand made only modest updates to the existing name mark, orange-with-straw, and other label elements, they’ll likely avoid a repeat of the 2009 calamity that resulted in precipitous sales decreases and ended with reverting to the previous carton after a few weeks.
If sales wind up recovering to normal levels after the expected initial drop and the new package saves a few cents per unit, this will wind up being a good business decision even though it isn’t the best decision from the marketing perspective. If sales don’t recover, expect to see the carafe make a triumphant return with the updated label.
Either way, we’ll all be adding a chapter to the Tropicana case study we assign students when we’re teaching distinctive assets.
Justin Combs 