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    Stop Selling It To Me Wrong!

    Posted Tuesday, February 24, 2009 4:41 PM | By Willa Paskin
    At the beginning of this year, Tropicana redesigned its packaging, replacing its decades old logo—the highly identifiable straw-impaled orange—with an artistically framed cup of juice and a sleek, vitaminwater-esque aesthetic. Orange juice drinkers and grocery store goers the country over were aghast, universally agreeing that that the makeover sucked, badly. Customers were so horrified that they complained to Tropicana directly, telling the company, according to the Times, that the new packaging was "'ugly' or ‘stupid,' and resembled ‘a generic bargain brand' or a ‘store brand.' "

    Tropicana, heeding the advice of its "most loyal consumers" and recognizing that it had "underestimated the deep emotional bond" between juice drinkers and juice containers, decided to trash the new look and return to the old favorite. Yay! Victory for the people! They really told that Tropicana how to ... sell juice to them better?

    The new packaging does stink and I'm glad to see it go, but there's something unsettling about consumers getting together to complain about a company's crappy ad campaign—no one should care this much about something created expressly to manipulate them. Beloved packaging is, it turns out, just like a beloved TV show: Some people will sign petitions, send letters and make phone calls to save them both. It renders the standard complaints about product placement incredibly quaint—how can anyone get aggravated when a show like 30 Rock maybe pushes McFlurries to its audience, when, in all likelihood, a certain segment of that audience would happily advise McDonald's on the best way to sell said ice cream, especially if the company was doing it wrong?
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