i.justrealized

Here’s an example of rebranding failing – Tropicana. Tropicana made an attempt to rebrand its package only to result in a 20% drop in sales. What I suspect being the cause of the plunge is consumers feel too attached to the existing brand and it becomes representative of the taste. When you look at the Tropicana package, it triggers your senses in your brain that has been associated with drinking the orange juice. The change in design fails to trigger the same senses and results in unfamiliarity. So if you do rebrand, do consider that.

Tropicana rebranding before and after

Tropicana Line’s Sales Plunge 20% Post-Rebranding

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Tropicana’s rebranding debacle did more than create a customer-relations fiasco. It hit the brand in the wallet.

After its package redesign, sales of the Tropicana Pure Premium line plummeted 20% between Jan. 1 and Feb. 22, costing the brand tens of millions of dollars. On Feb. 23, the company announced it would bow to consumer demand and scrap the new packaging, designed by Peter Arnell. It had been on the market less than two months.

Now that the numbers are out, it’s clear why PepsiCo’s Tropicana moved as fast as it did. According to Information Resources Inc., unit sales dropped 20%, while dollar sales decreased 19%, or roughly $33 million, to $137 million between Jan. 1 and Feb. 22. Moreover, several of Tropicana’s competitors appear to have benefited from the misstep, notably Minute Maid, Florida’s Natural and Tree Ripe. Varieties within each of those brands posted double-digit unit sales increases during the period. Private-label products also saw an increase during the period, in keeping with broader trends in the food and beverage space. (Source: Adage)

Tropicana is scrapping the rebranded packaging.

And so… Windows 7 is the name for the new version of Windows, the successor of Windows Vista. The thing is… It actually is Windows 6.1 if you check system properties and this has been confirmed by the Windows Team Blog. I don’t think it’s that great an idea honestly. I prefer the marketing version number to coincide with the development version number.

we decided to ship the Windows 7 code as Windows 6.1

Windows 2000 code was 5.0 and then we shipped Windows XP as 5.1, even though it was a major release we didn’t’ want to change code version numbers to maximize application compatibility.

That brings us to Windows Vista, which is 6.0. So we see Windows 7 as our next logical significant release and 7th in the family of Windows releases.

We learned a lot about using 5.1 for XP and how that helped developers with version checking for API compatibility. We also had the lesson reinforced when we applied the version number in the Windows Vista code as Windows 6.0– that changing basic version numbers can cause application compatibility issues.

So we decided to ship the Windows 7 code as Windows 6.1 – which is what you will see in the actual version of the product in cmd.exe or computer properties.

There’s been some fodder about whether using 6.1 in the code is an indicator of the relevance of Windows 7. It is not. (Source: Windows Team Blog)

In the case, I think it would be better to just call Windows 6.1 Windows 7. I think it’s clearer for developers who are going to start using the Windows platform.

Don’t you feel that somehow this New Moon Essence of Chicken looks kinda similar to a competitor product? Has the same tone of green. New Moon also uses a gradient in their bus stop advertisements. That lime-green to darker-green gradient can also be found on a logo of a rival product.

I think they can do better in -ahem- product differentiation. (more…)