The story about Tropicana’s failed redesign wouldn’t have caught my attention or ire if I hadn’t read the Brand Week article referenced in the New York Times.
The part that bothered me:
Here is the capper: Tropicana wanted a physical mnemonic for the brand. The design team at the Arnell Group took half of a mid-season orange and created a cap that mimicked its peel in both color and texture… The cap is made from a special gauge of plastic with a soft rebound to it, he said. “It’s got a tactile quality, not unlike an orange. It helped us create a whole new ritual for Tropicana.
Clever, but completely and entirely irresponsible. Creating a new plastic, non-renewable widget to sell a purportedly natural product seem counter-productive. The entire process of creating a new piece of plastic is destructive, even if the end-product can be recycled.
This was a golden opportunity to reinvent the packaging to reduce waste and materials, or the product to be pesticide-free, and they blew it on a squishy piece of rubber that no-one noticed or cared about.
Seth is right, marketers can be evil. And dumb. In this case, more dumb than evil.