In January, we wrote about Tropicana’s packaging disaster. At that time, we could only speculate the damage on sales suffered by the brand. Now that the numbers are out, we thought we’d give it another go.
Advertising Age’s Natalie Zmuda, recently reported that Tropicana suffered a 20 percent sales decrease between January 1 and February 22.
According to Zmuda, “The entire refrigerated-orange-juice category posted flat unit sales and a 5% decline in dollar sales during the period.”
Competitors have benefited from Tropicana’s rebranding fiasco. Many of them, including Minute Maid and Florida’s Natural, posted double digit unit sales increases in the same time period as Tropicana’s loss.
Naturally, Tropicana doesn’t see a correlation between the 20 percent decrease in sales and the botched rebranding effort. Zmuda reported that a spokeswoman for Tropicana in an email said, “No dots to connect here.”
I would much rather prefer that Tropicana admit the rebranding campaign was a complete failure. The company needs to give credit to consumers for getting the brand to go back to a more familiar and well-liked design. The one thing that Tropicana can’t do, is pretend that this didn’t happen and let Minute Maid, Florida’s Natural, etc., run off with disgruntled consumers from this incident.
I give Tropicana props for the new look, though. Not only is it clean and simple, therefore making it stand out from the clutter, but it also plays to our psychology (um, neuromarketing*) by attracting us with the look of a generic brand. Basically, we will feel like we are saving money, even though we are not.
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