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Comment by tomcam | Hacker News Reader

It is my theory, backed up by nothing but instinct and my own very fallible personal experience, that many customers simply did not “see“ the new design. That is, they would have preferred to buy Tropicana but assumed it had disappeared from the shelves.

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Yeah.

The article has all this stuff about emotional attachment, blah blah blah.

Really, orange juice is kinda hit and miss, so I prefer to stick with a particular brand (Tropicana). The redesign is

1) totally unrecognizable

2) pretty generic looking

It is literally just hard to spot next to the other juices.

I think most importantly it's that sideways text is harder to process at a glance than what we're used to. So, it ends up becoming a design element rather than text. And the orange/straw icon is also, in some ways, a pictograph for recognition.

The orange with the straw was pretty good branding, pretty unique while being straight to the point.

They also had that ad in the 90's.

https://youtu.be/wUVp3zyqo3s

Yeah the problem is simply loyal customers not being able to find the product. Supermarket shopping is a continuous game of Where's Wally, especially if you shop in a different one to your regular. Don't make that game harder.

I agree with all of this. Re#2 it’s even worse than pretty generic. It looks like a generic/unbranded OJ, and for some reason it looks like a low quality OJ to boot.

I’m guessing it’s a picture of their actual juice, but it looks very bland, especially compared to the bright ORANGE color of… an actual orange (or at least, of an over saturated orange).

On top of that, a major redesign of your package implies a major change in your product. Not everyone is keen of change.

Yes, I have lost, literally lost things I liked to buy at the grocery, due to changed packaging.

One time I had to Google images for a 20 minutes to find old images, then write down the brand/ type.

Another, the package changed, and the new package stated some strange "new" ingredient, which left me struggling to know if the flavour changed.

I honestly would just prefer a package never changes for my entire life.

Edit: also, I don't want my favourite food to be "new and improved!". Leave it alone!

Likewise. My wife once sent me to the store to buy Cheerios and Honey Crisp Apples. I grabbed the Cheerios, then, still on the cereal isle, I looked everywhere for thr Honey Crisp Apples - before I realized the Apples were apples in the produce department

I don't understand your comment about the apples, why wouldn't apples be in the produce department?

"Honey Crisp Apples" sounds like a cereal, presumably.

I think Apple Honey Crisp was a cereal at one point...

And the Honey Crisp apple is very new. Even though released in the 1990s, it takes decades for production to grow, and, for other regions to get cultivars and start selling them too.

Then on top of all that, for most people to even know about new apple flavours, it must compete for space at the grocery...

There has to be like 20-30 types of apples now. I can't keep track.

Don’t worry. The correct answer is always Fuji. FTFY

His brain cross connects with honey bunches of oats and still thought he was looking for cereel I guess?

How is that relevant?

If you're not aware, "New and improved" generally means the product was changed to reduce ingredient costs. So hopefully I've ruined the "meaning" for you.

What I feel like can happen with these changes is they'd probably push this as "See how much money we've saved by using these ingredients instead and the change in taste is barely noticeable!". Then they'll go through this process 10 times in the span of years and you'd end up with something that taste completely different than the original.

Yes, but not reduce my angst.

I'm inclined to agree. The article's talk about "resonating" with the audience is wishy-washy, and seems far-fetched for accounting for a 20% decrease in sales.

On the other hand, a UX design tenet is to test, not assume. Just because it sounds right doesn't mean it's the correct explanation (that goes for both TFA and alternative theories).

Well, they did. It’s just that the test cost $30 million!

I'm relieved this is the second-to-the-top parent comment.

They literally did an eye gaze study showing that just about no one saw the logo (and even fewer read it), yet their conclusion is some emotional fugazi.

Yes - if I'm interpreting that rapidly-changing GIF correctly, where previously people were drawn to the brand name now their eyes focused on "100% Orange" ... which completely commoditizes the contents.

"I couldn't find the stuff we normally get, so I bought this one because it was cheaper".

Yeah, scanning a shelf, I would assume that the redesigned package was one of those internal brands with very generic package design.

This was absolutely my impression too. "One is Tropicana, the other is the slightly upscale store brand."

It's not made very clear in the article, but the eye tracking study was not done by Tropicana, but after-the-fact by an eye tracking company.

It actually happened to me, actually more than once on drastically changed designs. I buy the same thing I had at home, because I like it, and why change things that work?

At the store, I don't see it. I may notice that product with the same name, but the spell is broken, it is no longer the product I mindlessly buy again and again, and it may be a good occasion to try something else. Even worse, I may end up buying competing products that look more like the original design than the new design of the same brand.

I've seen some brands where they changed the design, but they have a plan to retrain people. There will be a callback to the old design on part of the packaging, or they use the old packaging but change the name, but on the top corner write 'same great taste as whatever the old name was'. Maybe they wait a few months or even years to confirm that sales didn't fall before they can fully shed the old branding.

>Even worse, I may end up buying competing products that look more like the original design than the new design of the same brand.

I wonder what the legal implications would be of copying a product's old abandoned design? Especially if the original was to revert back?

I think you're spot on. The older design shouts out "TROPICANA"; it's bad enough they removed the iconic orange from the new design, but you have to tilt your head 90 degrees to even read the logo.

Yeah, honestly, I think there are several brands I buy in grocery stores for which I don't know, or at least don't remember, the brand name. I just recognize the packaging and think "oh yeah, that's the one I like".

100%. The design is also just completely shit. There’s nothing wrong with it in terms of it being more “modern” and “minimal” it’s just designed by someone who isn’t at remotely good at graphic design and overseen by people who are similarly clueless. I’m sure the designers were able to ask the right questions to get the responses they wanted from their focus groups. The blind leading the blind

The design is also just completely shit.

We should be careful with strong words, but in this case they may be appropriate.

I am surprised by how the redesign looks like a lot of store brand versions.

Thank you! Exactly my thought. The first thought on seeing the new design was Safeway Essentials or some shit.

Yup. The redesign looks like any number of grocery store "house" brands, which are typically awful.

The eye-tracking heat map GIF in this article supports this too. Before everyone saw the logo, after they didn't. My first thought when I saw the new one was that it looks like an own-brand product, that heatmap probably explains why.

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