Tropicana is a very famous brand that sells fruit juice worldwide. On January 9th 2009, the Pepsi Co-owned brand decided to replace the existing packaging design for its best-selling orange juice with new packaging for the North American market. However, this new packaging design was rejected and criticized by the majority of Tropicanas consumers. The launch of the new packaging was indeed such a failure that Tropicana had to drop it to come back to the original version of the packaging.

First of all, lets summarize the facts to better understand the reasons for this packaging failure.

1. Tropicana invested 35 million dollars in an advertising campaign that promoted the new packaging for the fruit juice brand. Both the packaging design and the advertising campaign were created by the same agency; Arnell.

2. On January 8th 2009, Tropicana launched the new packaging for its best-selling product in North America Tropicana Pure Premium, with sales revenues reaching more than 700 million dollars per year. A few days later, consumers started criticizing the new design, especially on social networks. Two months later, sales dropped by 20%, and this spectacular decrease in sales represented a lost of 30 million dollars for Tropicana.

3. Meanwhile, Tropicanas competitors took advantage of the Tropicana crisis and gained the sales lost by the fruit juice brands.

4. On February 23rd 2009, Tropicana announced that it would return to its original packaging design, and within a few months, the old packaging was back for good on all supermarket shelves

5. In total, this initiative cost Tropicana more than 50 million dollars

Tasks:

a. Explain how packaging could affect consumer buying decisions. [20 Marks]

b. How can the change of many brand elements affect sales? [10 Marks]