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."
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Being too generic can kill many a thing, I suppose. It works for the generic brands, though. Poor, Tropicana.
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