Date: 2024/08/14
Costing millions and leading to a rapid backtrack, it serves as a stark reminder to marketers: nurture your brand’s truly distinctive assets.
But frankly, I’m sick of hearing about it!
This infamous case has cast a long shadow: with such a storied reminder of what an ill-informed pack redesign can do to sales, many marketeers may be tempted to take an overly cautious approach to pack redesign, stifling creative potential. The focus has shifted to testing designs against rigid, transaction-based KPIs like improved purchase intent, rather than exploring a pack’s broader potential for brand growth.
At The Big Picture we fundamentally believe that packaging design has a far greater and more holistic role to play for a brand in building meaning and developing relationships with people, AND converting those into sales.
Pack is the most ever-present piece of your marketing mix; it lives in the home like no other touch point, with opportunities to build meaning and enhance brand values throughout its life-cycle, with ongoing ‘moments of truth’. Why obsess solely over the first moment of truth, in-store, when so many people discover your brand in eye-catching social media campaigns or in the homes of others, making you fall in love with said brand? Challenger brands take a bow:
Our Pack360 model takes a more nuanced and layered view of the role of pack within the marketing mix. Of course, it needs to be capture attention and clarify its proposition… But its role in sparking connection, emotionally engaging with your target, and cultivating brand love (for what is often a relatively commoditised product) is also fundamental to effective pack design. Especially in a world where your pack lives on social media as much as on shop shelves.
So can we learn from Tropicana? Yes absolutely: respect truly distinctive brand assets. However, can we also please stop talking about Tropicana?!
Let’s look at the role of packaging in a more nuanced and holistic way to create great pack design that builds brand meaning, as well as shelf impact: does your pack capture attention? Does your pack clarify what it’s offering? Does your pack connect emotionally? Does your pack cultivatelonger term bonds, building on your brand values in-home?
This is how we can empower creative agencies to create bold and well-informed design change that respects brand equity, but also enables truly effective and powerful design change… consigning the ghost of Tropicana to the past.