Consumer Force
Who knows the brand the best? The brand manager? The guy who is managing sales through distribution channels? or the one who is not at all part of company – the consumer?
There have been cases that a big brand was forced to take back a change just because the consumer was not happy with the new offering. And mind it, when a brand has made its mark, it sure does a lot of research before launching the change in market as a perfect brand is made by hearts, by emotions and they get disturbed easier than a brain ofcourse!
Tropicana New packaging
Recently PepsiCo found it in Tropicana the hard way, almost 24 years after Coke learned it through New Coke. The PepsiCo Americas Beverages division of PepsiCo is bowing to public demand and scrapping the changes made to a flagship product, Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice. Redesigned packaging that was introduced in early January is being discontinued, and the previous version is being brought back.
Also returning will be the longtime Tropicana brand symbol, an orange from which a straw protrudes. The symbol, meant to evoke juice’s fresh taste, had been supplanted on the new packages by a glass of orange juice and an orange-colored twist cap atop large cartons that is shaped like a halved orange.
Some of those commenting described the new packaging as “ugly” or “stupid,” and resembling “a generic bargain brand” or a “store brand.” This is what undersconsideration had to say about the brand – “This new packaging feels, at best, like a discount store brand with what looks like, again, at best, rights-managed stock photography if not outright royalty free. And the typography is, once more, at best, a lame derivative of how the British have lately exploited geometric sans serifs like Futura and Avenir to great results—here’s just one example of many.”
Tropicana Old packaging
But what is starking here is the role of Web2.0 means in these marketing effects. While it took months for Coke to understand that its new Coke taste was a flop, PepsiCo came to know about it in matter of days, thanks to blogging, twitter tweets, facebook and hate mail forwards on these channels. This November, many consumers used Twitter to criticize an ad for Motrin pain reliever and received responses within 48 hours from the brand’s maker, a unit of Johnson & Johnson, which apologized for the ad and told them it had been withdrawn!
Lesson for marketers? The same old one – brands rest in minds of people and not with the one who make the product/service.
Addendum
If you think it was only Tropicana packaging that PepsiCo tampered with in this tough time of recession, here is a food for thought, they even changed the packaging for Pepsi itself! And its not just the style of bottles or new funky colors, but they were bold enough to play around with the logo, in , I repeat, this tough time of recession!! Here are the visuals of what these guys did to a pretty neat brand…
New Pepsi Bottles
So are you suggesting that there should be no change in the personality of established brands, or that the change should be migrational rather than abrupt?
Neither in this post. What am pointing in this post is that the bottomline is customer is more powerful than the brand manager, even so more for the established brands.
But talking otherwise, definitely the personality of a brand should be refreshed from time to time. The choice of being abrupt or migration will depend on case to case basis. If its having better recall and there is not much change in product or service offered, it should be going for migration to make sure they leverage the present brand following.