What the Failure of Tropicana Rebrand can tell the church
by Paul Prins at 4:33 pmFollow Up Post: Psychology of Tropicana Re-branding Failure
Yesterday it was announced by Pepsi Company (the owners of Tropicana brand Orange Juice) that the new packaging/brand that they rolled out in January for Tropicana will be removed. Over the last two months Pepsi has undergone a very aggressive re branding campaign of many of their largest products (Pepsi brands, sierra mist, mountain dew).
Now in a statement released by Pepsi Co and an article in the NY Times Pepsi says they are rolling back the brand to the much more familiar orange with the straw in it. So what was the problem?
The most telling of the criticism in the Times piece was this:
“Do any of these package-design people actually shop for orange juice?” the writer of one e-mail message asked rhetorically. “Because I do, and the new cartons stink.”
It got me thinking about the marketing that the church does. Rewording their question for a church marketer becomes something like: “Do any of us in church marking actually spend time with people outside the church?”
Churches don’t have the budgets and numbers to work with like Pepsi company so it is important that we ask very pointed questions about our desired audience to reach. There also needs to be some interaction between the people creating those campaigns and the market that they are geared towards.
In some cases this will mean designing for Christians (in the case of a youth retreat or conference), and in others for non Christians with the promotion of a sermon series or other outreach. The failure of the Tropicana re branding can help us to remember, it’s about those we are targeting, not about us designing.
March 2nd, 2009 at 3:01 pm
[...] wrote about the re-design failure of Tropicana last week and this week the older style packaging should be showing back up on the store shelves. [...]
July 22nd, 2009 at 8:44 am
[...] Back in February we wrote about the failure Pepsi company ran into while re-branding their orange juice line, Tropicana. Today there was an unveiling of an updated redesign that is much more faithful to the original design that consumers rebelled so strongly to have back for their Trop50 product. [...]