Kansas City Food Blog

The amount of money spent to brand and advertise everyday items can be bewildering. The single largest advertiser in the world is Procter & Gamble (more than $5 billion a year) and it's tough not to think, "If P&G stopped running ads for a day, would its sales really fall?" Or how about some of the other largest advertisers? 

Yes, sales would really fall and Pepsi has the Tropicana experience to prove it.
A quick time line: At the beginning of this year, Tropicana announced a complete overhaul of its packaging, getting rid of the familiar orange-with-a-straw logo. Two months later, everyone agrees the overhaul is an unmitigated disaster and so the company switches back to its original logo.

Now, Tropicana has released its sales numbers for those two months. Orange juice plunged by 20 percent. A brand that's been cultivated for 30-plus years loses a fifth of its customers in fewer than 60 days! Not only did Tropicana lose ground but its competitors gained. AdAge explains, "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."

It's not that people stopped buying orange juice, it's just they decided for one reason or another not to buy Tropicana. Orange juice is a parity product. All the competitors are essentially the same. (Like laundry detergents or toothpaste.) In parity products the only thing there is to distinguish one item from another is branding and advertising.

The biggest problem wasn't that people couldn't find Tropicana as some claim, but that the new logo was too generic. By not distinguishing itself, Tropicana gave people no reason to spend the extra money. It'd be as if Crest put out a white tub that just said "toothpaste" and charged the same price for it.

Somewhere, someday, business and advertising students are going to be reading about this as a textbook case of "If ain't broke don't fix it."