Jay Meydad's Life Mashup

Consumers are consumers no matter what online service or product they use. Once we use a product and like it, we are emotionally attached to it and become very passionate about it. This has not changed for years, but in current days, we (the consumers) have powerful tools such as blogs, twitter and facebook, to express ourselves quicker, louder in order to make a change.

Seeing companies make a (stupid) decision and then revert back as a result of users protesting against it using all sorts of social media applications is a pretty common thing in the online world. The last example was Facebook and its T&C fiasco. Seeing more an more big offline companies acting the same way is a nice surprise for me.

Take these two sentences:

“We underestimated the deep emotional bond they had with the original packaging. Those consumers are very important to us, so we responded.”

“I feel it’s the right thing to do, to innovate as a company. I wouldn’t want to stop innovating as a result of this. At the same time, if consumers are speaking, you have to listen.”

If you think they were told by Mark Zuckerberg or another executive of some popular web company you are wrong. They were said by Neil Campbell, president at Tropicana North America, who is about to announce today, according to the NYTimes, that Tropicana is going to scrap the new packaging and return to the old one. Why? Because we , including myself on this blog, complained about the new design and asked for the old one.

So, I applaud to PepsiCo for listening to its loyal customers and acting fast. I can’t wait to see the good old carton, with orange & straw, in stores.

I was buying groceries the other day when I noticed cartons of a new orange juice brand on the shelves. Well, it took me about 5 seconds and a much closer look at the package to realize that that was not a new orange juice brand. That was the re-branded Tropicana.

So, if it took me that long to recognize a juice that I have been buying for a few years, something was not done right. Let’s take a closer look.

The old cartons used to have a large Tropicana logo, in a thick and bold “tropical island” font. The logo was horizontally displayed above a strong visual element – a picture of a large, juicy, fresh orange with a straw stuck right into it. White was a dominant background color which helped bringing the logo and the image to the front. The combination was very powerful. Cartons were easy to recognize on the shelves from 20 ft away. The entire design screamed freshness and it felt like you are buying a product that was made from oranges that were picked moments ago.

In the new design, the Tropicana logo uses a much smaller and narrower font. It is also displayed vertically which makes it really difficult to read. The slogan “100% Orange” is what is displayed horizontally and feels as the brand name. In addition, the main visual element was changed to a photo of a partial glass (visual illusion?), full with orange juice. There is also very little white area, so less contrast and more blur of visual elements. And when you actually look at the juice, it looks as someone spent hours in Photoshop trying to remove any sign of pulp and freshness. Overall, the box looks synthetic and of a no-brand orange juice made out of concentrate.

And there is more. The pulp levels labels in the new design are so small and hard to read compared to the old design.

The last funny thing is the website portion. When you visit the Tropicana website, the new box is displayed only on the home page, while the “Juice Finder” page shows boxes in the goold old design (see image below in gallery). Even the PepsiCo site still shows boxes in their old design!

I find it hard to believe that a company as big as PepsiCo, which spends millions of dollars on branding and marketing, would  execute so poorly. How can you throw away years of brand & identity recognition among millions of customers and replace it with such a lame design? And how can you release a product and start a multi-million dollars marketing campaign without updating your website?

Update (Feb 23, 2009): The new design is gone. The good old design is back. More here.

Tropicana Juice - Old vs New Design

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So, you have decided to present at a conference, spent thousands of dollars on the booth space, renting or shipping equipment, ordering schwags to give away to people, staffing the booth and more. How do you make sure you will get something back? Well, first you need people to talk to and present your product. So, how do you get those?

First, I will start with what you should not do. For that, I am going to use a photo I took last week at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco. I have nothing personal against this guy but no wonder his booth is empty. So, never, never, never have a high chair, sit on it and wait for people to approach you.

Instead, stand up, face the people who walk the halls, be proactive and approach them with lines that would get their interest.

At Snap, our director of marketing came with a very simple line: “You need a pen!”. The typical answer is “ha?!” because this is the last thing people expect to hear. But then we pull the trick and show them that our pen also has a very cool flashlight that displays the Snap Shots icon. And once people see the flash light, they walk into the booth just like bees who get attracted to the light.

As Jon Burg said in his post – how powerful would it be if a marketer could get your attention by not screaming at all?

The challenge is to connect an event like this, which captures peoples’ attention, to an ongoing interaction and relationship between the brand and the consumer. Is it possible at all?

Check out this 60 second campaign.

A few weeks ago, a new company bought the license to sell Apple product in Israel. Today, I read an interview with Eran Tor, the GM of that company, iDigital, and one of his quotes caught my attention:

אין משרד פרסום שלא פנה אלינו, כי כולם מבינים מה הולך להיות פה.

My own translation: There is not a single advertising agency that has not spoken to us, because everybody understand what is going to happen here…"

Yes, the advertising agencies understand that plenty of $$$ are going to be spent, but what about the consumers? Who is going to care of their needs and make sure Apple products are full localized to Hebrew? and how about allocating some of these marketing $$$ in order to buy apple.co.il? or making sure the iDigital site works properly on Safari for Windows and does not break(see below)?!

And what about the language used on the site? The English & Hebrew mishmash sounds really bad. Couple of examples:

• What does this mean in Hebrew?
  

• How should it be called? Mac or מק or מקינטוש

 

At least, iPodHE, the utility that adds Hebrew support to iPod (but not iPhone) is finally free.

Virgin America campaign’s tag line, ”Grab a Seat”, is brilliant and the online campaign they had just began looks phenomenal. I saw their ads earlier today, visited their super modern, elegant & sexy web site, and immediately knew that my next flight to San Francisco, New York or Vegas will be with them.

I mean, how can you resist to mood lighting, plugs in every seat (no more desperate searches for those few available electricity outlets in the airport) and a cabin that has the amenities & ambience of a W Hotel suite?

Technorati Tags: Virgin America, Marketing, Travel

I forgot to twitter while I went out on Saturday night. So, here are some recommendations from a very enjoyable evening…

• Go and watch Death at a Funeral. A British comedy with humor that can be sometimes sophisticated and sometimes pretty silly. Still, you will laugh and laugh and laugh…I can not remember when was the last time I (and an entire theater) was laughing so loud and so much during a movie. BTW, Do yourself a favor and DO NOT WATCH THE TRAILER! The less you know ahead of time the better

• If you happen to be/live in LA, make sure you to try the food at The Village Idiot. The place looks great, has ecstatic atmosphere, extremely tasteful food (try the Steak & Potato Pie) and the prices are pretty cheap.

• Watch the Coke Zero ads. Their hidden camera campaign with lawyers is brilliant.

Technorati Tags: Recommendation, Death at a Funeral, Movies, Village Idiot, Coke Zero, Marketing, Campaign