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Comment by jonplackett | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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