A red-and-white straw protruding from a juicy orange. Retro-inspired typefaces. Shiny, eye-catching colours. Tropicana’s new look is bursting with visuals that harken again to a nostalgic childhood breakfast—and it’s every little thing the corporate’s final rebrand did not be.
The brand new design was created by the U.Okay. model and packaging-design company Sunhouse after its longstanding partnership with Tropicana Europe products. It’s what marketers might call a “refresh” rather than a full “rebrand.” As a substitute of overhauling Tropicana’s whole visible identification, Sunhouse spruced up the company’s existing assets utilizing inspiration from the archives, bringing a contemporary contact to a model that was based in 1947.
“The juice class was seen as a commodity and in decline, with many customers selecting own-label over branded choices,” says Sally Knapton, Sunhouse companion and government artistic technique director. “The juice panorama had turn into a sea of sameness, and Tropicana was making an attempt to compete on purposeful advantages moderately than investing within the model to construct affinity and long-term development.”
Now, Tropicana is pivoting to reestablish its authority as one of many nation’s first packaged juice manufacturers, which made it a pioneer within the house (and a key determine of many childhoods). It’s a shift that pairs effectively with Tropicana’s new marketing campaign, “THAT juice”—which means, in Gen Z parlance, Tropicana desires to be the It woman of orange juice.
Tropicana’s tasteful 2024 refresh reveals that it discovered a useful lesson from 2009, when the rebrand took away the enduring orange pierced by a straw, simplified the emblem, and flipped it vertically. Prospects hated the rebrand so much, and protested so vehemently, that Tropicana, with its tail between its legs, pulled the brand new packaging from cabinets altogether. Though one lone element of that rebrand—altering the cap to appear like a tiny orange—was, to be honest, a very enjoyable concept.
However on the time, consumers panned the new look as showing low-cost, simplistic, and customarily unrecognizable. Tropicana North America’s then president mentioned that they’d “underestimated the deep emotional bond [consumers] had with the unique packaging.” The entire affair reportedly value Tropicana greater than $50 million, and it was such a snafu that it’s since turn into a case study in marketing courses.
“It’s all the time difficult to construct on a model with such iconic and established equities, and I’m positive there have been good causes for the 2009 redesign,” says Knapton. “However going purely on what we’d learn within the press, it felt like model sacrilege.” The distinctive model marque and the established inexperienced and straight-from-the-source story with the straw going into the enduring orange had all been stripped away. “The model felt completely unrecognizable,” she provides, “with all of the craft and element being changed by a glass of juice—a class generic.”
It’s unlikely Tropicana’s new refresh will face an analogous backlash. Sunhouse has reinstated the pierced orange because the packaging’s central icon, full with a drop of juice sliding away from the straw. In response to James Giles, Sunhouse companion and government artistic director, it’s a visible that “highlights the pure, pure goodness of the product, which is one thing Tropicana is thought for and imitators can’t replicate.”
Sunhouse barely adjusted the Tropicana wordmark, giving it a slight arch and including an orange dot above the “i.” The company selected Brother 1816 as a major font as a result of its tough handmade end evokes a way of authenticity. And the phrase “The unique since 1947” is added in a roundel to the emblem for a retro look, emphasizing Tropicana’s decades-long heritage. And, to prime it off, the orange cap is again.
“That element from the 2009 rebrand felt just like the smile within the thoughts that was lacking from the identification wherever else on the packaging,” Giles says. “It bolstered the purity of the fruit story in a playful means, and we have been desperate to reintroduce it as one other element to emphasise the ‘straight from supply’ actual fruit promise in a memorable means.”