Tropicana: Mob Rule Marketing

The saga of Tropicana's redesigned orange-juice package leaves us with an ugly truth: Thanks largely to the Internet, companies are increasingly being forced to cater to the unpredictable whims of angry, insensible, irrational mobs.

In February, PepsiCo-owned Tropicana announced that, in the face of fierce criticism of the redesign, the cartons would go back to the old look. At the time, Neil Campbell, president of Tropicana North America, said the change wasn't because of the Internet mob that had formed to reject the new package, but because the product's most loyal customers—a tiny fraction of the total—were turned off by it. "We underestimated the deep emotional bond" that those customers had with the old package, he told the New York Times.

If that's true, we now know that Tropicana's most loyal customers buy a lot of orange juice. Advertising Age reports that sales of Tropicana plunged an astounding 20 percent in a matter of weeks after the new package was introduced. Given that number, it seems likely that the Internet reaction had a wider effect than Tropicana had guessed (or would divulge).

From which it must be concluded that, increasingly, the American consumer economy is being driven by Internet mobs and by the kinds of people who develop deep emotional bonds with orange juice cartons.

That can't be good. Predictably, the whole thing is being described in some quarters as a victory for the people, as if an army of bloggers and commenters had ousted an evil dictator.

Now, there's nothing wrong with customers registering their opinions online. It often appears to be more effective than a reliance on focus groups. But let's not mistake it for an unalloyed good. Tropicana lost tens of millions on this fiasco, and unnecessarily so.

Ad Age notes that, usually, rebranding tends to increase sales in the short run, thanks to the buzz that surrounds it. That's true even if, in the long run, the change turns out to have been a mistake.

If not for the Internet mobs and their strange obsessions, it seems quite possible that the Tropicana rebranding would have followed precisely that course. That's because the new package is, in fact, not very good. It's dull. It's not distinctive, like the old package was. The name "Tropicana" is shunted off to the side while the words "100 % Orange" are prominently displayed, which makes it look like a generic product.

Still, sans the bizarre backlash, it's hard to imagine that more than a few people would have developed strong feelings about it either way. (A new study shows this to be so.) Indeed, sales might have drifted lower over time, and Tropicana would perhaps have quietly rebranded again to regain them. Or, if Tropicana had simply stuck to its guns, people—even the enraged Internet commenters—might simply have gone back to drinking Tropicana since, after all, it's the same juice.

Instead, because people were goaded into outrage over an orange juice carton, Tropicana and PepsiCo find themselves in the middle of an expensive public-relations disaster. And that just seems wrong.

Part of the problem seems to be that, online, all outrage appears to be equal. When Facebook went through its recent redesign, the tone, and in some cases even the language, of the "outrage" seemed creepily similar to the outrage expressed against Bernie Madoff or the bankers who wrecked the economy. It's impossible for marketers to know whether or not to take such complaints seriously.

If companies are to be expected to react every time online complaints reach a critical mass, expect those companies not to display strong marketplace leadership, but to be pitchforked into action by the loudest, and most obsessed, among us.

On March 26, Slate hosted "What Is Good Design Now?" a panel discussion on design and marketing. The clip below covers the Tropicana repackaging debacle.