Comment by b112 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by b112 | Hacker News Reader

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The sad part is, I have literally lost brands. Just entirely been unsure what I used to buy, because I buy based upon look, not just on product name.

EG, I buy battered fish in a blue box, the box disappeared from my main grocery store. When I went to my less visited store, it was gone there too. Literally, I just picked a random replacement brand.

Another thing which gets me, is marketers think everyone buys things weekly. And I once noticed a product I was hunting for with "New look!" on the box, but if was the last of the "New look!" boxes, the ones behind tem were missing the pronouncement.

I'm buying fish sticks here, and I do so once every 6 months, and throw a bunch of boxes in my deep freeze.

I'm not tied into what "exciting change" some yahoo thinks their product is going through, nothing is exciting about the food I buy, I just want fish sticks.

The box could remain the same for 100 years, and I'd buy the same thing, as long as the taste and quality inside didn't diminish.

UI designers ruined Gnome, ruined my fish sticks, ruination upon us all due to UI designers.

Oh, and don't get me started on flavour or product change.

I don't want "new and improved". Stop it! Leave my tasty thing alone. The number of times I've changed brands, and never gone back, because "improved"...

And the worst, I buy frozen pizza. Unlike my fellow shoppers, I buy for the best crust flavour, and only meat.

Why?

Because if you want good frozen pizza, buy great crust, meat only, the put fresh veggies on it! Meat freezes well, not so much veggies.

Lately, one brand has added "croissant crust" and also "cheese in crust", and unless a supermarket is the size of all creation, it doesn't have room for one brand with 8 types, by 3 styles.

The result? The best crust, without extra calories(cheese), is now impossible to find.

I had to switch brands.

Just stop it ffs!

I’ve always thought a lot of ‘improvements’ are really cost savings while trying to maintain the quality of the product or change it a little so it isn’t noticed as much; “It’s better, so if you don’t like it that’s on you.”

"New Look" is usually a synonym for shrinkflation.

I'm thinking 'New Coke' here. What a disaster.

Coke literally had a small amount of cocaine in it, as a stimulant, prior to new coke being released. It was grandfathered in, still allowed at that point.

New coke was released, because they were being forced to change their formula. Some say they released new coke, knowing they'd have to re-release old coke, but that by that time the average person would not accurately notice the taste change.

A friend of mine, a coke fan, kept a case of old coke. He tried the newer-old coke, side by side...

It didn't taste the same.

Some say new coke was a wild success. Loads of media attention, and they dropped the formula change in without notice...

I thought it was because they switched to HFCS?

Coca-Cola hasn't contained serious levels of cocaine since 1903, although it did use some coca leaf extracts up to New Coke, but that is not the same as cocaine just as poppy seeds are not the same as heroin. It's not clear that they were "forced" to remove that.

The New Coke story is quite interesting, but I don't buy in to most "explanations" of it. I think it's far more likely it's a case of "competitor X is more popular! We need to do something! Let's copy competitor X!" This is a classic business mistake, because customers are choosing you instead of X because it's not X, and if you merely copy X you lose your value.

I agree mostly, although as a counter-example, about a year ago Nutella released a new "extra cocoa" variant which was much tastier, and a bit less unhealthy (lower sugar content).

It was so good that I refuse to buy regular Nutella anymore, even though the "extra cocoa" edition seems to be no longer sold.

Lisp did this to me for every other programming language.

I'm mad that as an Italian (where Nutella was created) this is the first time I'm hearing about this +Cocoa version. Apparently it's not even marketed/sold in Italy at all! It's for the US market only.

Twiglets - crunchy snacks coated in yeast extract - have been ruined. Yeast extract is quite salty so to meet the government's new healthy food guidelines the manufacturer has removed more than half of it. They are pointless now, bland and a bit greasy.

They've been my favourite snack for years. I'm gutted.

You could always make your own: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4whf9o

Ingredient prices can vary wildly, even outside of inflationary periods. Customers also prefer prices to change rarely, so the only option left is to change the pack size and/or reformulate. Eg cocoa prices varied from 3,300 USD/T to 2,000 USD/T in 18 months. Sugar nearly doubled in the last 3 years. A product released at one point would not be economical at another.

Of course, if you are not price conscious then you can mostly avoid these issues by buying the most expensive of everything, but you're talking frozen pizza here...

I’m assuming due to the croissant crust reference that you’re saying the best crust is the digiorno original?

Here, Canada, it's Delissio. It may be the same thing though.

For me, out of the brands I can try locally, its crust seems best.

"New and Improved" is corporate speak for we spreadsheeted the flavor out of it.

  We changed our recipe to increase our margins and the testers didn't even notice! You're gonna love it too.

That is how I read the subtext of these "new and improved" labels.

My local grocery store recently redesigned their milk packages. Before the change the two variants were white and blue respectively. Now they are blue and white. They literally switched the colors after (iirc) 15+ years of the same consistent colorscheme. I'm still puzzled by that move.

> The box could remain the same for 100 years, and I'd buy the same thing, as long as the taste and quality inside didn't diminish.

See this comes down to simple maths though. If you can retain enough of the loyal customers and win some news ones with the "exciting change", the net difference is worth it.

This keeps happening so I guess the maths checks out.

It’s also possibly done because people train themselves to like familiar tastes. There might be a small drop in sales, but eventually as more customers buy the product they will get used to the new flavour.

I no longer assume rationality on the part of businesses and consider doing so a serious mistake. Businesses often have short term thinking and have shown themselves perfectly willing to shoot themselves in the foot.

The original comment that started this thread listed a bunch of plausible and probable causes of branding changes, and all of them are only rational from the point of view of an individual and orthogonal at best to the improvement of the business they are working for.

> UI designers ruined Gnome, ruined my fish sticks, ruination upon us all due to UI designers.

Many modern UI "designers" are certainly not worth of that name, in that they change things not according to systematic study and observation, but only due to their own hunches and personal preferences.

Is a designer that bases their designs on numbers, not aesthetics or user experience, really designers?

Usability studies have so many confounding variables that it's not even funny. It's not hard to pick studies to support anything. As if that wasn't enough, they're highly contextual and inevitably used in a completely different context.

None of the well known great designers of the past century relied on A/B studies to do what they did. Granted, they likely delivered a lot of duds too, but at least those designs could be identified as bad.

Designs with statistics behind them can never be bad because the numbers haven't changed, and the numbers was what motivated the change in the first place.

The thing that separates good UI designers from the bad are superior hunches and personal preferences.

> I'd buy the same thing, as long as the taste and quality inside didn't diminish

This is too much even. Of course it's better if the taste doesn't change. But there is a huge I've already bought this before in my buying patterns. Unless something becomes unserviceable I'll probably keep buying it.

Hang about, UI designers didn’t ruin Gnome... and the changes made in Gnome have nothing to do with product packaging and logo changes!

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