What Students Are Telling You About Your Website Design

This is the second of my two-part post recounting what we learned in a recent series of online focus groups on website design and navigation.  The objective of the research was to gather input to guide development of a client’s new website.  Participants were high school students from the Midwest reacting and responding to  the client site and four carefully selected comparator websites.

We often use online focus groups to understand how and why target audiences respond to various types of communications.  Like all of our focus group work, these were designed for a specific school, but much of what we learned applies to any college website.

In the first post, What Students Really Want (click here), we laid out four factors that the focus group participants indicated were shaping their reactions when they visited a home page for the first time:

1. Design, content, color that define a strong personality
2. High-impact, descriptive photography
3. Friendly content that gets to the point fast
4. Clear navigation to find desired information easily

With regard to #4 above, careful interpretation of the user-group input identified two categories of information that prospects looked for in the initial website visit to see if they were interested enough to learn more:  Info they needed, and info they wanted.

Information that students need encompasses “Threshold Factors” that determine whether or not your institution can make it to the short list of schools that can be considered.  User group input showed that the pathways to Threshold information have to be clearly identified and easy to follow from your home page:

1. Program listings
2. Tuition and fees
3. Financial aid
4. Location

While you need to have clearly defined pathways to such information, it doesn’t necessarily mean that program listings, tuition and fees, location, and financial aid information should be at the very top of your navigational scheme.

Here’s why:  Focus group participants identified a second critical category of initial information – information they wanted to see.  These are Motivational Factors” that get prospects excited and energized enough to stay on your site and to find out more:

1. Campus setting and student life
2. Scholarships and Awards
3. Reputation
4. Brand personality and promise

Based on the user group input, shaping the user experience in a way that blends both Threshold and Motivational factors in a seamless and compelling way is the sine qua non for an elegant, effective student prospect website.

The more powerfully you communicate Motivational elements on the home page and throughout the pathways that prospects use to navigate to Threshold information – through engaging student-life images, concise brand messages, teasers about scholarship opportunities, designs that convey distinctive personality, and reputation-building proof points –  the more successful your site will be in generating inquiries and interest.

The trick is to communicate this sort of branded motivational information pervasively on your site in short, intriguing bits and pieces so that prospects are interested enough to get to the information they feel they need.  And once they arrive at Threshold information, you want that information to be absorbed within the context of your most motivational branding environment.

The Athletic Image

As many of you out there know, the athletics marketing team typically operates separately from the academic marketing unit  And we have been faced many times with the question of how the core brand should interact with the athletics brand. Sometimes the athletics brand is part of the core brand and sometimes it becomes an independent brand and at times it is somewhere in between. However the athletics image is connected to the core academic brand through brand architecture, there is a connection between the two entities in the minds of your audiences.

Back as an undergrad, I remember there was a team meeting for athletes that talked directly about how an athlete should conduct themselves and when and where they can wear university logos, sportswear, etc. For example, it was mentioned that no athlete should wear any athletic or university logos when going to a party or out to a casino or other non-favorable places. We were told that we were representatives of the school and should behave as such.

All of this came flooding back into my head when I recently came across a series of fan contest materials for the University of New Mexico. The idea is great, a “who-is-the-biggest-university-football-fan” contest to see who is Lobo Loco. Lobo fans are awesome and very loyal and the contest is a great way to pull them even more into the Lobo teams. So, I kept digging into the contest and saw who was sponsoring the contest.

The contest is sponsored by a local casino, with television commercials of a skimpy-clothed blonde and the university mascot.  The commercials are sexual in nature and the promotion directly ties the athletics program to gambling. The Lobo Loco promotion site says “The action continues all season long with Lobo Loco Free Slot Tournaments every Wednesday night throughout the season inside the Route 66 Casino. Players can sign-up at the Ultimate Rewards booth absolutely free. More than $7,000 in prize money will be given away each week”. Pure sponsorship would have been ok, but to directly tie the athletic image to a casino in a sexual nature is taking it a bit over board. Below are two commercials for the promotion:

After the meeting mentioned above and the athletic scandals at other nationally known universities in the past several years, I was surprised to see the athletic department itself sell its image to the casino. While there is no direct connection to the academics in the marketing materials, it is hard to separate the perceived connection between the athletics and the academic brand of the University.

After hearing some buzz from the school, I understand the University of New Mexico’s marketing team is going to launch a new branding effort in the near future and I doubt they were expecting this.  I also doubt that some of the messages put forth in the commercials are part of the University of New Mexico’s new brand. As this contest is only about a month old, I will interested to see how this will effect the academic brand in the near future.

So what does a university marketing team do to avoid this kind of issue with, not only, the athletics unit, but other university units and departments. Here are some helpful tips:

• Brand dialogue. While athletics marketing teams are familiar with branding, athletics is apart of the university’s core brand in some shape and form. There should be a discussion so both units understand each others goals, strategies, and tactics.  Also, to understand how the two units should interact together.
• Provide some brand tools. While the athletics marketing unit has its own materials and resources, they still need some brand tools to help consolidate messages and some of the creative elements (based on the brand architecture).
• Constant dialogue. Schedule some regular meetings to catch up on the two unit’s progress and how each other can help.  Is there some room for cross-over or collaboration?
• Set guidelines. With any brand, including the core, sub, extension, or independent brand, there are  guidelines to follow. How, what, where, and when each unit is to express their brand?

Also, while the sponsorship has been hailed as one of the largest sponsorships in Lobo athletic history, it doesn’t give the sponsor the right to go nuts. There must be some collaboration between the athletics, academic and sponsoring brands about what is appropriate and not appropriate so the sponsorship is a win-win for all entities involved.  How should the brands look, how they should interact together, etc? After awhile, a negative image, similar to the one portrayed above has the possibility to tarnish both brands.

I am interested if any else out there has had similar issues.

Hey, That’s My Tagline!

Several of our clients within the past year have been surprised to learn that the strategic taglines and campaign themes we created for them were compelling and popular enough that competitors began using them, too!

So now what? While imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, stealing your thunder is going a little too far. But there are lessons to be learned here.

The first institution in question had protected their tagline by registering it as a trademark of the university. About a year later they learned that another institution had started using the same tagline as a campaign headline. Since the phrase had been trademarked, the university attorney was equipped to send a cease-and-desist letter to the offending institution. The competitor demurred. Case closed.

Truth is, you can’t legally stop others from using your marketing idea. Headlines and taglines can’t be copyrighted, and a trademark protects only the execution of the tagline as it’s associated with your name, not the words or the idea themselves.

However, trademark establishes ownership. It plants a flag in the ground, and stamps a date on it. Most offending institutions, when alerted to a prior claim like this, wisely choose to drop their use without further ado.

Now consider a second case. This client launched their campaign using a consistent high-impact branding theme – they didn’t trademark it as a declared tagline, but simply used it is as a prominent recurring headline and guiding theme.

They learned a year later that a direct competitor had started using the same headline in their ad campaign. Which college owned the idea? From a marketing perspective, the key is “ownership” in the public perception.

One choice, for example, would have been to simply abandon the campaign theme to the competitor and create an alternative. Yet we advised the opposite.

Since this institution had a significant investment in the brand – months of intense research, consensus building, and a strategic rollout, a strong identity was already built around the branding concept. They owned the idea among internal stakeholders. We recommended that they quickly build robust opportunities for external audiences to see their decisive “ownership” of the phrase. Put it prominently on the Web, use it for SEO keywords and adwords, create banners, give it to faculty and recruiters as a primary talking point, use it as branded event theme, and in advertising. Connect themselves to it.

If a campaign theme is important to expressing your brand, it’s a matter of who best “walks the talk”? And when an institution establishes this level of ownership, competitors who use the same theme end up pretty much advertising for you. In short, while the idea may not be legally protected, “ownership” of the tagline and the essence behind it can carry the day.

But the real moral of the story is this: If a branding concept, tagline, or campaign theme is important in defining and supporting your brand promise and you would like to use it for several years or more, protect it through trademark as a strategic tagline. Internal legal counsel can do this for you.

It’s easy to check for prior trademark protection to see if any higher education institutions or large corporations have already laid claim to your phrase or idea. Just go to United States Patent and Trademark Office website or the Canadian Intellectual Property Office website and search for the phrase in question. If it’s not being used, pounce on it!

Recognize Me?

My 2 year old son has recently been watching PIXAR movies. He can already recognize the beginning sequence with the lamp bounding across the screen and jumping on the “I”.  He excitedly smiles and points at the TV because he knows  he is about to watch one of his favorite movies.

We all recognize and are familiar with hundreds, if not thousands, of marketing images around us. As we all know, the most easily recognizable marketing image is typically the logo.

Many of us have run into some of these games that you guess the company based on only a portion of logo or wordmark.  Take a stab at naming the company based on the portion of the logo seen below.

You may recognize several of the logos and you may also start to have ideas pop in your head for what the company behind the logo stands for. As we all know, the logo is only one aspect of the visual representation of the brand based on lots of research, data, and testing. But as illustrated above, logos can be a powerful representation. Even just a small part of the logo can be recognizable and bring up an emotional or thought provoking response.

Below are 16 logos of large state and internationally known higher ed institutions in the U.S.  Try and take a guess as to what school these logos/wordmarks belong to.  Does the small portion of some of the logos below bring up some kind of response? Is the response as strong as the responses from the corporate logos above? Can you describe some of the schools brand as well as you could for some of the corporate logos?

How many can you get right? Write your answers in a comment below, after a while I will let you know if you are right.

How does this help you, you ask? First, here are some questions to ask yourself about your current logo.

• Is your logo unique?
• Is your logo recognizable?
• Do you have identity and logo standards?
  • Color?
  • Font?
  • Use in different scenarios?
  • Size/shape/proportion?
• Does your logo bring up the appropriate response that you want it too?
• What emotions/thoughts does your logo bring out?
• What do internal and external audiences of your university/college think of the logo?

As mentioned earlier, the logo is only one aspect of the visual representation of a brand. If the logo doesn’t match the brand, your stakeholders may not be getting the full and correct visual and emotional response that is intended of the brand. In the end, having a “correct” visual and emotional response to an easily recognizable logo is one aspect that can help bring in like-minded stakeholders.

The corporate logo games above came from http://www.joeykatzen.com/alpha/#guess and http://www.bizzia.com/brandcurve/game-name-that-brand/

Un-sites and Other Lessons from the Frontiers of Marketing

If there’s one thing that has defined marketing for almost the last 100 years and perhaps even more so today, it’s the constant drive to find new ways, new words, new mediums to spark consumers’ imaginations. For daring groundbreakers, that implies huge risks, huge failures, and huge rewards. For everyone else, it means new ideas, new inspiration, and new opportunities.

A few years ago, Advertising Age published its list of the top advertising campaigns of the century. The publication had three criteria for judging a campaign:

• If it was a watershed, discernibly changing the culture of advertising or the popular culture as a whole.
• If it itself was credited with creating a category, or if by its efforts a brand became entrenched in its category as No. 1.
• If it was simply unforgettable.

At the top of the list was Doyle Dane Bernbach’s 1959 “Think Small” Campaign for Volkswagen.

Ad Age wrote this about it:

“First of all, our thanks to Kurt Kroner, the man behind the defining example of the greatest advertising campaign of the century. He wasn’t the copywriter. That was Julian Koenig. Nor was he the art director. That was Helmut Krone. Nor was he elsewhere employed by Doyle Dane Bernbach, the agency that stormed the confining Bastille of advertising orthodoxy to ignite the “creative revolution.”

Actually, our hero wasn’t in advertising at all. Kurt Kroner was the one, among 3,389 Wolfsburg, Germany, assembly plant workers, to flag a blemished chrome strip on the glove compartment of a 1961 Volkswagen Beetle and reject the vehicle for delivery. Yes, if we are to believe Koenig’s copy, Herr Kroner gave us the famously failed and fabulously forlorn. . . “Lemon.”

God bless him, because in so doing he also gave advertising permission to surprise, to defy and to engage the consumer without bludgeoning him about the face and body. Kroner offered up a lemon with approximately the same result of Eve offering the apple. Not only did everything change, but suddenly things were a lot more interesting.”

Suddenly Things are a Lot More Interesting
In following the developing trends in marketing today, it strikes me that we’re at a moment in time, like 1959, when things are about to get a lot more interesting. And that’s exciting.

The explosion of digital mediums. The interactivity of those mediums (touch screens; voice activated commands; hands-free, full-body video control). The cross pollination of technology (using your cell phone to connect to your online presence; your TV to get additional information on material you’re watching in a broadcast…). The social networking rage. The expectation of user engagement. All of these are forming a perfect storm of possibility. Most in the marketing business are still struggling to understand how to use these mediums effectively. What I see most often are still campaigns designed from a very last-century world view – they talk at the consumer rather than with the consumer. There are a few, however, that are paving new ground, and perhaps one will become that groundbreaking campaign that will change everything. Like a great multi-stage bike racer – say Lance Armstrong – (a little plug for my favorite sporting event, the Tour de France as it is the month of July), a savvy brand manager will stay at the front of the marketing peleton (cycling term for big bunch of riders) watching carefully those marketers who break away from the pack, and jumping on the wheel of those mavericks of the race who show the most ability to help you achieve your goal. Or, better yet, know when to leap out in front yourself.

3 New Trends to Stay on Top of

1. Let Others Do the Talking About You

A new genre of websites, or rather, un-sites as blogger David Griner calls them in his blog “Web 3.0 is About Taming the Deluge of Data” are tapping into social network and Web content streams to promote their brands.

The upside: it’s fresh, updated frequently, honest, and less of a workload for you.

The downside: it’s unpredictable, uncontrollable…and honest. If you’re willing to risk the downsides, the upsides could reap rewards. How much, hard to tell yet.

Some examples of these types of sites:

• Skittles, which uses people’s references to its brand on their Twitter feeds; comments on their facebook page; and flickr and YouTube posts as the company’s website.

• The ad agency Modernista! which literally uses the Web as its website. When you type Modernista! into Google or you type in modernista.com you get a Google search page and several small red bars along the top of the page. One is the site navigation (you can drag and place it anywhere on the page you like) and the other is a notice that says the following:

“Do not be alarmed. You are viewing Modernista! through the eyes of the Web.

The menu on the left is our homepage. The blog is ours. Everything else is beyond our control.”

2. Brand Minimalism

Another type of un-site is the kind that takes the brand to where Web users hang out rather than making them come to it. For example, the agency BooneOakley’s site exists only on YouTube.

When you go to BooneOakley.com, it directs you to the company’s YouTube page where you can watch this video

The upside: it’s unexpected, invites user engagement, has a built in feedback mechanism, uses a video interface, is concise, should be simple.

The downside: it’s concise, perhaps too simple, feedback is open for all to see.

3. The Challenge

Probably nothing gets people more intrigued than if you challenge them to figure something out. In a perfect marriage of product, medium, and message, Samsung’s latest campaign for its new phones with high definition cameras is a poster child for how to do this right. The campaign, created by the Viral Factory in London, challenges viewers to figure out how the phone appears and disappears in the ad when the entire spot was shot in real time, on the camera phone, with no editing. The genius here is the chatter that it created simply by people trying to guess the trick. Samsung then came back and posted a “How we did it” piece, which had people coming back to their site/product to see the reveal.

The upside: it’s intriguing, highly engaging, it fits the medium beautifully, is a great example of something that feels self-made but was professionally crafted, promotes chatter, brings people back for more, gets multiple views as people are trying to figure out how the trick is done, and the metrics are easy to track. Not only are the views tracked by YouTube (over a million so far), but marketers were able to track how many times individual visitors viewed the piece, how long they watched it for, and whether they spent time replaying pieces of it.

The downside: hard to see a downside to this one, other that some of the random lude comments some people made. In general, I’d say this is an idea to jump on when you can.

Initial Spot

Camera Trick Revealed

For All You Strategists Out There: Communicating Strategy to a Designer

When I first began working at EMG in 2004, I will admit that I didn’t completely understand how solid strategy and creative design worked together. I had no idea how important that idea really was in the whole scheme of a successful brand. Why would you need a “separate brain” to think about strategy? Doesn’t that just come naturally along with the design? Well, no, not really.

To me, a successful strategy means conducting some really deep-thinking sessions. It’s ultimately about knowing who you are. Some designers are also great strategists and some strategists are fantastic designers. As someone who’s more into the strategy piece than the creative (though I try to enter the creative world from time to time), please allow me sum up what I’ve learned in a little over four years’ time: you have to let designers do there thing, but with some strategy laced into it.

That may or may not strike a cord with the strategists when it comes to explaining a certain strategy you’d like to see brought out in a design. Whether it’s a certain way of cropping images, or the making sure that certain design elements are used in ways that can translate to multiple mediums, it’s important.

For those who are big time strategists who are typically thinking hard and long about strategy, it is best to often repeat “I am not the designer!” There’s certainly a grey line between a lot of aspects and that’s when working together becomes so important.

Avoiding stepping on each others feet can be challenging and it’s advantageous to have a long-standing, working relationship with designers. When you’ve worked with each other before and can almost read what the other is thinking, it makes this process much easier, and most times fun.

But, as is in most cases…, what if you don’t have this close strategy-designer relationship? Well, for one, just have patience. Secondly, you’ve got to be a good listener. Really understanding where they’re coming from goes a long way. It can help immensely to be sure you’re familiar with a lot of their previous work. Lastly, stay optimistic! It’s a lot easier to see each other’s points of view when you’re expecting a positive outcome. These tips will definitely help the strategists out there work closely with the designers out there.

So do any strategists or designers out there have any stories, good or bad, about the challenges and/or rewards of working together?

Get More Face Time on Facebook

On the heels of Travis’ recent post Get Engaged!, I started looking more closely at Facebook’s (FB) rapidly evolving advertising strategy. The two major spaces the company is focusing on are a beefed up ad presence on its coveted FB Home Page and on email pages.

For me, the jury is still out as to whether an increasing ad presence will hurt or help FB in the long run.

As a user, I’m not that thrilled – except when the advertising is fun and creative, then, I personally don’t mind it. And it’s presence on the sidebar means I can tune it out pretty easily.

However, as a marketer, I can’t (and I’ll tell you that you can’t) pass up the opportunity to use FB’s new offerings to advertisers to help build connections with your target audiences. I’d tell you, you shouldn’t rely solely on this space, but it definitely should be one of your mediums in a well integrated campaign to gen Y and gen X audiences. See the blog Facebook Experimenting with Video Poll Home Page Engagement Ad Unit.

The numbers make a pretty compelling argument to be in this space. According to FB’s Manager of Brand Market Solutions, Trista Handisides, the Facebook home page is the “most engaging page on the Internet” – with nearly 6 billion monthly minutes spent, compared to 3 billion minutes for Yahoo, 1.86 billion for MSN, and 700 million for MySpace. (check out her comments at the Facebook Marketing Breakfast).

Particularly intriguing to me, are the possibilities to incorporate video into ads. In a move that’s very on FB brand, the videos are combined with polls that ask something of users, as an engagement mechanism. These aren’t hugely widespread yet, but I suspect we’ll see a growing number. I know they certainly catch my eye more. To get an idea, look for the current Lexus campaign. It’s a nice combination of a TV driven campaign that is intriguing enough to give it a viral quality on the Web, i.e. by using the polls on FB to ask audiences what they believe is happening in the commercial. Answering the poll takes you to Lexus’ FB page, where you can learn more about the product, see the other ads, and, of course, read what others are saying about the campaign.

What a great opportunity for higher ed marketers to get creative. Taking the big picture view, you could go the Lexus route by using TV combined with other tools, including FB. However, you’d have to have a good question to pay it off. For example, our client, the University of Southern Maine is currently running a TV campaign with the theme “That’s Education My Way, this would marry nicely with a FB video/engagement spot that invites the user to choose what “Education Their Way” would look like and lead them to a University prospective student page that would further the conversation. You heard it here first USM!

Other opportunities on FB include using banner ads like the flash ad for Best Buy on the left. These appear mostly on your email home page.

You’ll also see polls included with intriguing still images.

The ads I’ve been discussing are all negotiated through FB’s advertising unit. If you’re doing these kinds of ads, it’s a good idea, to work with an agency as it will know the ins and outs of negotiating in this space and can give you some pointers on how to get the most out of this investment.

The ads you see most often, consisting of a headline, image, and a brief sell line below, are the kind you can create yourself right on FB. They come at a set price for view and performance. These are a great way to get started and, for the price, a good medium to incorporate into your ad buys aimed at younger audiences. But, if you can, step it up. It will pay off in terms of building engagement equity for you brand. The added bonus is that FB’s great metrics allow you to measure results in real time. But that’s a blog for another time…

On a side note… three finalist for the International Brand Master have been chosen: Andrew Careaga, Catherine Scruggs, and Jenny Beckman-Wong (in no particular order).  Now the voting is in your hands! Read about the top three nominees and their accomplishments in higher education below and vote for which person you think exemplifies their profession. Don’t take the voting lightly as the 2009 International Brand Master will be asked to speak of their challenges and successes at the Brand Manager’s Summit in October of 2009. Vote by Wednesday July 8 (click here).

Creative is as Creative Does

In some recent posts, we have mentioned that one way to be impactful, engaging, and do things inexpensively is to be creative. Well, I recently came across some typically dull things that many of use that have been improved with some creativity.

We all use business cards. Here are a few that are extremely creative and can get through the overload and clutter of the same-old same-old.

Many of us have used bus ads. Here are several bus ads that break the mold. They really utilize all of the textures, functions, and shapes of the bus to make their point. Just don’t stare too long at them, we don’t need anyone getting into an accident.

And below are some miscellaneous ads that really stick out. While many of them are all clever, there are a couple that may not always be in the best taste and appropriate for many cases, especially not appropriate for higher ed. It is often hard to be creative and not cross the line. You’ll know which ones I am talking about when you see them below.

The point is, make sure the creative still communicates your organizations brand while still pushing the creative envelope. And know your audience, who are you trying to reach with your radically creative ideas. With faculty it may be best to communicate with the radically creative ads and with current students it may best to communicate with traditional ads. And last, judge when it is appropriate to be over-the-top creative and when it is appropriate to be traditional. Just like one of those big special effects movies, don’t add the special effects just for the sake of adding special effects – make sure it fits in with the story line.

Of Taglines and Brands

A great tagline (1962) that helped Avis triple market share in 4 years.

Last week I was counseling a university brand manager who confided her concerns that the internal stakeholders of her organization – faculty, staff members, students, alumni – were beginning to believe that their tagline was, in fact, their brand.

She was right to be concerned.

Taglines aren’t really required for great campaigns. Lots of organizations that have effective marketing programs don’t use them. But a strong tagline can do wonders for a brand campaign by offering an enticing and memorable preview of what differentiates your brand.

Maybe even more importantly, they provide a rallying cry that internal stakeholders use to help articulate a shared vision: A clear focal point, a source of pride, an intriguing introduction to the value your organization provides for its audiences.

I’m thinking of Washington State University’s tagline, which was developed in 2000 and is still being used nine years later: “World Class. Face to Face.” For this statewide organization, it has been an internal statement of pride about the unique value that WSU provides students, and a declaration of what truly differentiates the organization in the marketplace.

Another really successful tagline is “Defy Convention,” used by Clarkson University for more than five years. It grabs attention, it’s intriguing, and it hints at the unique attributes and attitude of this, the smallest nationally ranked research university in the nation.

Then there is “what’s your dream?” that has inspired thousands of Corpus Christi students (as well as legislators and donors!) for more than nine years and while enduring through the changes of successive presidents at Del Mar College.

My personal favorite is still The University of Maine, Presque Isle, “North of Ordinary” which has served this tiny campus in the North Maine Woods well for about ten years. It certainly gets noticed – an important function for a tagline – but at the same time it defines the organization’s fierce pride in excellence in what they do, based on one of the defining characteristic of their brand – it’s geography.

Because good taglines are compelling, it’s easy for internal stakeholders to begin thinking that the tagline IS the brand. But in each one of the outstanding examples above, the tagline only hints at the brand, and doesn’t encompass the fullness of what differentiates each organization, and the unique value that each provides for its audiences.

So it’s important to constantly reinforce the brand platform – which states not only the brand promise, but the primary attributes that allow your organization to deliver on your promise better than anyone else – among internal constituencies. It’s easy enough to do: posters outlining “Our Core Values” throughout campus; periodic articles on the intranet and the faculty/staff newsletter that simply state your brand platform; internal awards that honor those who exemplify the brand attributes.

Our clients have also come up with some unusual and incredibly fun, interactive ways to make the brand platform come to life for faculty, staff, students, and alumni, and we’ll recount some of those in upcoming posts.

Packaging Makes Perfect

A couple weeks ago Bob posted on the topic of brand evolution, I followed up with a post on Dora the Explorer’s transformation mishaps. Here is yet another recent example of a brand evolution gone wrong.

I went to the grocery store today and I got to the orange juice aisle. I saw two different versions of Tropicana’s orange juice carton. I then remembered hearing all of the news the last couple days about the new Tropicana carton design that was replaced with the older design. Why? According to an AdAge article, Tropicana and PepsiCo released data earlier this week illustrating sales for the orange juice fell 20% during the almost 7 weeks the new packing was on store shelves.

The old and returning package design is on the left. The new and now scraped Tropicana design is on the right.

The 20% drop in sales gave proof to Tropicana, PepsiCo and Omnicom’s Arnell Group (packaging designer) of the poor performing packaging and another round of bad news. Around the first of the year, Tropicana began to release its newly evolved packaging design for its orange juice cartons. It removed the traditional orange with the straw sticking out of it for a new more modern look. It also got a new sculpted orange-like cap. The first round of punches and bad news came on February 23 of this year when the New York Times wrote an article about Tropicana receiving a lot of consumer complaints. The article says that consumers “described the new packaging as ‘ugly’ or ‘stupid,’ and resembling ‘a generic bargain brand’ or a ‘store brand.’” And “‘Do any of these package-design people actually shop for orange juice?’ the writer of one e-mail message asked rhetorically. ‘Because I do, and the new cartons stink.’”

This article also announced that Tropicana would be reverting back to its old design, however keeping the new orange-like cap. With the news of the 20% drop in sales, it was probably a wise move on Tropicana’s part to go back to the old carton design.

Below is the CEO of the Arnell Group, Peter Arnell, defending the new packaging in a February news conference.

This brand evolution blunder may have been preventable. I am sure Tropicana and the Arnell Group focus group tested the new package design with its target audience. But I wonder if they misread the results of the testing or did it get a large bias in the focus groups to skew the data. Also, as suggested in the New York Times article mentioned above, the new Tropicana design may be the latest casualty of the technology and consumer’s ability to blog, tweet, chat, or post their dislikes and opinions almost instantaneously for everyone, including marketers, to see. The use of technology is allowing the world of consumers to real-time focus group test almost everything nowadays.