Tropicana

Tropicana Pure Premium was an orange with a straw in it. You could pick it out of a cold case without reading. That picture did more work than the word Tropicana, which is a remarkable thing to admit and also obviously true if you have ever stood in front of a supermarket fridge.

In January 2009 PepsiCo hired the Arnell Group and took the fruit off. In its place: a glass of juice, a tall wordmark, a quieter carton. Same juice. A campaign around the new pack was put at about $35 million. Peter Arnell’s drawing looked expensive in a boardroom and cheap in a dairy aisle.

Shoppers could not find the carton

That is the whole case, before anyone gets to taste. Shoppers said they could not find Tropicana. Some said it looked like a store brand. Within two months, Advertising Age reported unit sales of Pure Premium down about 20 percent between 1 January and 22 February, with dollar sales down about 19 percent, a hole usually put near $30 million. On 23 February PepsiCo said the orange was coming back. Gina Judge, speaking for Tropicana, said they had learned how much people cared about that picture.

Every juice brand can own a glass. Only one had spent years teaching people that this orange, this straw, this cap meant Tropicana. A glass of juice is a category shot. A straw in an orange is a brand. Arnell swapped them and called it modern.

The cap that looked like half an orange was a nice object. It did not save the pack. People do not shop with their fingers on the cap. They shop with a glance along a row of nearly identical cartons, and the glance was trained on a fruit.

A shelf cue is not a decoration

This is the same family of error as Gap a year later, only Tropicana had to live with it in refrigerated fluorescent light, which is less forgiving than a homepage. Gap lost a box. Tropicana lost a way to be seen. Pepsi, another Arnell job from the year before, had pulled the word out of the globe. Different objects, same instinct: subtract the thing that makes the shape unique, keep the colours, hope the name is enough.

The orange came home. The campaign around “freshly squeezed” could stay; the anonymous glass could not. If you want a rule from a juice carton, it is this: do not remove the only picture a hurried shopper uses to find you, then act surprised when they find someone else.

• Tropicana Discovers Some Buyers Are Passionate About Packaging, Stuart Elliott, The New York Times, 23 February 2009
• Arnell’s Latest “Design” Debacle, Adweek, 2009