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Comment by numair | Hacker News Reader

I looked at the title, opened the link, searched for “Peter Arnell,” got zero results, and knew the article was total garbage.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/arnells-explanation-of-failed-t...

I had a close friend who worked on a project where they brought this guy in. Charged $1m a month and invoiced his jet fuel to the company, if I remember correctly. Now you know where the $30M actually went.

The article is an example of insufferably authoritative articles about “design thinking” combined with pseudo-science (the heat map image). You don’t need to know any of that, to know that Peter Arnell was an idiot and his design was utter junk.

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But Indont think this is about "some guy came up with a crap design". It strikes me a number of things went badly

1. I think C-level execs at major corporations should have built up immunity against such bullshit.

2. The heatmap (plus the associated idea of lots of consumer testing) should have spotted something

3. the rollout seems to have been global and immediate, instead of for example testing the new packaging out in say tiny geographical markets first

All of this reeks of failing to have rock solid product management (and release mgmt) at its core. Maybe we will find out more, but in the end, the loss was manageable, sales recovered and maybe the company learnt its lessons - would be interesting to hear what process and people changes occurred the days after ?

C-level execs are the bullshit in these stories. They meddled with something that wasn’t broken and this was the result.

Logo Management is practically a cliche. Can't think what else to do to justify the big bucks? New Logo™!

So articles like these completely miss the point of the commercial design industry.

The goal isn't sales - never mind brand awareness. The goal is to make C-suite execs feel like they're doing something exciting, and maybe even a little creative.

From that POV I'm sure the Tropicana rebrand was a huge success.

And if a design fails, it's always the agency's fault.

As someone who has worked in product design for many years, the most important part of the job is making sure bad changes and ideas don't get pushed out. Yes, making sure they don't do anything is a crucial part of the job and I'm always very busy with that part of things, especially if it's something that comes down from the C-level.

> the rollout seems to have been global and immediate

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropicana_Products#:~:text=tre..., it was "only" in the US (it was in 2009 btw); weird, I wouldn't have been surprised if the $30 million was already spent before they actually went into store shelves. It wouldn't have been "just" a packaging redesign, they would have to do a big marketing campaign (billboards, TV ads, etc) as well to make people aware the packaging had changed.

I think the heatmap was done by the ones who did the article :)

This article is massively over thinking it.

The problem is the lack of a the word TROPICANA written really big on the carton.

I doubt people ‘stopped relating to it’ because of the lack of straw. They just didn’t know it was Tropicana at a glance, figured it was sold out and bought something else.

That's it, I mean it would already have less impact if they put "tropicana" horizontal and the biggest font size on it. Instead it was "100% juice", which is what you expect on a brandless, generic product.

People don't buy orange juice, they buy Tropicana. Likewise, they don't buy lemon & lime soda, they buy Sprite; they don't buy beer, they buy Budweiser or Heineken because you can't call those products "beer", and oh also the brands are well known I guess. We don't use search engines, we use Google; conversely, this is why Facebook's corporate rebranded to Meta, because they wanted to distance themselves from the social network.

When I lived in Scotland, Tropicana was the luxury juice option for the piss poor student I was.

And it definitely mattered that the label boldly proclaimed the name Tropicana, because that meant no need to read further in, just check if it was my preferred kind (no bits).

With the name missing, I'd probably end up not buying even if I had the funds specifically for it, because it would be easier to grab some juice from concentrate.

Yep. Replace the prominent brand logo of a consumer product with something in a generic sans serif font (in a different orientation!) and people are going to think it's a generic alternative and skip straight past it, straw or no straw. There's no straw on the Tropicana in my fridge...

I mean, I imagine younger McDonalds customers feel far more emotional connection to the brand's clown than anyone does to a straw, but replacing Ronald with some "healthy eating" pictures isn't going to kill sales at a branch nearly as much as quietly replacing the golden arches with an "M" in Generic Gothic...

I think the lack of an orange with a straw coming out probably *was* a huge part of the issue. Both boxes have Tropicana written really big on the carton, although one is slightly smaller and sideways.

A box with an orange with a straw looks like a Tropicana box, even if you can't read, and it's a visually engaging image.

The redesign looks like supermarket generic juice packaging, the orange with a straw is as distinctive as the Coca-Cola or Pepsi logo.

> The redesign looks like supermarket generic juice packaging

This is the number one issue. The writing is part of it but overall it just looks bland and not ‘fun tropical’.

Also aside from the brand text size, the new box looks like a store brand style of graphic.

The human brain processes and identifies images much MUCH faster than text. The prototypical figure cited is 60,000x faster. I don't know the source for that figure, but it makes inherent sense that the human eye can visually identify the shape of a juicy edible fruit much faster than it can read an english word.

This is spot on.

I only buy orange juice when people visit. Last time that happened I was at the store looking for Tropicana, but couldn’t find it. After several scans of the shelves I finally saw it under the new label.

I never noticed the cap was an orange either.

Here's Arnell Group's explanation of their Pepsi Logo redesign:

https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...

While I disagree about the heat map in the article being pseudoscience, I agree that Arnell's "design thinking" totally is.

This is an impressive level of bullshit. Like, this takes a degree and years of experience to bullshit at this calibre.

Architecture school. The dirty little secret of architecture is that it has no theoretical theory beyond jaw boning. (It can work, so don't rush to knock it.) So in architecture, a coherent narrative that can inform form making (like the light & gravity b.s. in OP) is the best you're gonna get. (The actual science based stuff is called Structural Engineering.)

> [1 light year = 671 million miles per hour]

hmm

It looks like they're trying to force an art into a science and it's just ridiculously off the mark. I wonder if agencies have to do this thing to have something more concrete to prove to clients even if it's bullshit and they know it.

Also, it's pretty impressive seeing the Pepsi branding just get progressively worse over the years. It's a little out there by today's standards, but I kind of like the 1898 branding the best.

I believe you should have read the article. It discusses $30 million in lost sales due to the packaging redesign. It was not talking about the costs to do the redesign.

It is mentioned in the article though:

"But why did it fail? How does a $35 million rebranding project fail?"

“It” here is the title, which is not talking about the cost to implement the redesign, only the lost sales. That the cost to implement the redesign is mentioned in one sentence, within an article devoted to explaining why the redesign failed, does not keep the top-level comment from being misaimed. Its clear the commenter is responding to a mistaken belief about the topic of the article (which he says he didnt read).

We had a discussion on this in design school... our consensus which the heat map also supports is that Tropicana failed to realize the strength of their logo.

It's not the orange since after all Tropicana makes a lot of different juices. It's the logo. Writing it vertically in a different font destroyed brand recognition and consumers simply failed to find the product on shelves. This agrees with the articles suggestion that they genericized themselves.

You still need to know _why_ it was junk, or else you might end up buying snake oil from someone else.

Yes, but the article should have also mentioned that the new design was pushed through by an overconfident star designer, that's definitely part of the story.

Regarding the actual design, sure, a nice fresh-looking orange is more enticing than a glass of orange juice, but I didn't even recognize that big orange blob as orange juice in a glass from the picture in the article, and I doubt consumers in a supermarket (who usually only see one side of the carton) would have recognized it at a glance. So you have generic-looking sans serif text beside a generic-looking orange blob. Doesn't sound like a recipe for success...

>... "squeeze" maintains a certain level of I guess power when it comes to this notion emotionally about what squeeze means like my squeeze or give me a squeeze or the notion of a hug or the ideas behind the power of love and the idea of transferring that love or converting that attitude between mom and the kids, right?

I am, once again, convinced that the entire marketing field is an elaborate joke played on the rest of us.

The article also praises the design of the new lid, which was - surprise - one of the most derided elements of the redesign in professional product design comminity. The idea was that you'd feel like squeezing an orange when opening the carton. In reality, you'd be squeezing that nipple to get to your OJ. Worked out as expected.

It's not a nipple it's just an orange shaped cap, when they say squeezing an orange they don't mean squishing it they mean rotating half an orange on a juicer.

Think the rest of the design deserves derision but don't see anything wrong with the cap assuming it's grip-able.

Sister comment links to a contemporary news report, saying that the cap was the only element to be kept when returning to the old carton.

https://youtu.be/WJ4yF4F74vc?t=29

Sometimes design professionals are more aligned with fashion than the customer.

Customers love little touches like that. Kids will grab the bottle and be delighted by it, etc.

This is why I love HN. I am the OP, and your comment made me realize what the article was missing.

yes. But it was $65 million. $35m for the idiotic design. and $30m in lost sales when it stopped people buying it.

I agree that the article would give more information if it gave the background information about the logo redesign, but that's not its topic; the topic is why the logo had problems, not how it originated.

> Now you know where the $30M actually went.

Do I? I have no idea how this loss figure is allocated between lost revenue, and wasted spending on the redesign itself. I'm supposed to believe your comment which insinuates that $30M went to some Arnell person, and nothing was actually lost, sales-wise.

Here's him talking about the design: https://youtu.be/WJ4yF4F74vc?t=29

This is fascinating in the worst possible way. Lot of fancy words alongside "the purity of the juice" when the ingredient list is full of weird things the average consumer has no idea about

I mean isn’t that the point? Most people still think OJ in a carton is squeezed from the orange in the tree itself or something.

It's one of those things that's obvious if you think about it, but still blew my mind when I read about orange juice being blended like wine with various oils, etc to ensure consistency throughout the year and across huge production scale.

Probably the subliminal advertising image of the straw straighy into an orange from childhood.

Listening to that verbal diarrhea, I had an unmistakable visceral reaction that George Carlin describes so well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UecRfBJ2LBM

If you want to see insufferable pseudo science Google "Pepsi gravitational field"

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