Monday, February 23, 2009

On a trip to the grocery store this past weekend, I needed to pick up a few breakfast items for my family.  One of the items on my list was orange juice.  Being the design geek that I am, I first looked at the packaging, then the price.  If you haven’t already heard, Pepsi recently refreshed the branding on almost, if not all of their product families, including their Tropicana brand.  There’s no doubt that a large sum of money was invested in this rebrand As I surveyed the landscape of juice before me, the Tropicana cartons stood out.  All of the other brands had imagery plastered over every square inch of real estate and the gratuitous use of whitespace made the PepsiCo product stand out, to me.

(Not from) concentrate

That’s when the individuality got lost.  As I examined each Tropicana carton it became clear that the option I was looking for (No Pulp) was as hard to see as the tiny bits of orange themselves.  It was only after I took a closer look at each carton that I was able to locate the type of juice I wanted to purchase.  Slight usability issue, but I got what I was looking for (not to mention the price was too good to pass up, regardless of the brief hassle I encountered).

The squeeze

Now just a few days later, I’ve read that due to an enoumous amount of loyal customer backlash, Tropicana will be reverting back to it’s previous look (from the logo to the carton graphics).  When this happens, I hold out hopethat some of the new look design considerations will live on, aside from the proposed cap design.