Bob Rinderle / Business & Beyond

Steve Jobs

The passing of Steve Jobs puts into sharp relief the difference between producers and pontificators.  Let's have less of the latter.

Where Good Ideas Come From

"Chance favors the connected mind."  Thoughtful idea from Steven Johnson, as captured in animated form from Cognitive Media.

 

Stop Gap Measures

Well, that didn't take long. Just months after Gap's widely publicized logo miscue, the company has overhauled its marketing and design functions. North American President Marka Hansen, and Ivy Ross, Gap's VP Global Marketing, are both gone, as is long-time agency Laird + Partners.

   
 As MarketingWeek reports:

"The Gap branding team had no idea what they were dealing with in terms of intellectual property. They didn’t recognize what currency the original Gap logo had with consumers and how strongly they felt about it. Nor did they understand how to deal with the dilemma in a multi-channel and vocal media culture."

Expression Of Joy

BMW's Expression Of Joy campaign extends their Art Car series and promotes the 2009 Z4.  I love it.  Even though the campaign has been around for a few months, I was reminded of it today by a two-page spread in this month's Fortune.

The campaign is nicely integrated and uses multi-media well, ranging from BMW's YouTube channel, to well-designed magazine ads, to the site itself (ExpressionOfJoy.com). 

I am a sucker for "behind-the-scenes" peaks into the creative process, and this site provides a multi-layered experience to the making of artist Robin Rhode's painting.  Unlike previous efforts in the Art Car series, where BMWs served as the canvas, Rhodes elected to use the Z4 as a paintbrush this time.  The result is wonderful. 

Innovation Via Social Communities

Forrester predicts that portable social IDs will transform how consumers, brands, and social networks interact.  Social networks will be the repository for online identities and relationships and will be the driving force for innovation.  Apparently the change is already underway according to a recent survey of CMOs:

• 47% will tap consumer communities to guide product development/design
• 47% will increase the use of social media to gather, test, market ideas

Tropicana Sales Drop With Design Change

Sales of the Tropicana Pure Premium line dropped 19% between Jan. 1 and Feb. 22 (resulting in a loss of $33 million) following the disastrous introduction of new packaging that some consumers called "generic" (see picture on the right).

The packaging was pulled after less than two months.

Design matters.  And while Massimo d'Amore, CEO of PepsiCo Americas Beverages, tried to downplay the severity of the situation back in February - "People do not buy design. They buy products. We have not changed the product" - the reality is that Tropicana's misstep cost them dearly.

Unit sales declined 20% while Minute Maid, Florida's Natural, and Tree Ripe all realized double-digit gains during the same time period in a flat category where share stealing is critical.

When brands know what they stand for and understand the brand essence that resonates with consumers, there is flexibility and permission to experiment with marketing inputs.  But when brands make guesses about their core equities they put on economic handcuffs - most often by being too conservative but also, as demonstrated by Tropicana, by being too presumptive.

 

Only 5% of Online Ads Are Rich?

I was surprised to read in Ad Age's Digital Issue that only 5% of online ads are rich (according to PointRoll).  That is far from the norm where I work, so I was shocked that rich ads overall are still in the single digits. 

With only 6% of people engaging these units, the whole experiential promise of online advertising - engagement, interactivity, affinity - is grossly underdelivered.  With all the focus on ROI and accountability - especially in these tough economic times - the ability to demonstrate real marketing value through deployment of rich media seems like a golden opportunity just waiting for the taking.

Skittles, Porsche, and Courage

Skittles is generating press for yielding control of their site to users via social media applications.  Porsche recently created buzz with the success of a mobile program that put messaging in consumers' hands at the point of sale. 

Besides being effective uses of technology, I am more impressed by the willingness of these brands to match strategy and tactics in a meaningful way for brand participants.  What is the ROI for the new Skittles site?  No one knows, but the fact that those managing the brand had the courage to do what intuitively makes sense to optimize the critical connection between the brand essence and consumer affinity should be encouraged and applauded. 

Intelligent Design?

An addendum to my Tropicana packaging post (below):

"The new design confused our core consumers and that's why we went back," said Massimo d'Amore, CEO of PepsiCo Americas Beverages, but "people do not buy design. They buy products. We have not changed the product."

If people buy products and not design, why scrap the new look?   

Because design is an intrinsic part of any product.  d'Amore knows this, otherwise he would not have initiated design changes across a number of PepsiCo brands.  One could argue, in the case of Pepsi, that design is the most important thing to a product that is essentially syrup and water.  Too bad d'Amore doesn't use the recent controversies surrounding Tropicana and Pepsi to defend and champion the value of design, rather than quickly dismissing design's role in the purchasing process.

(Quotes from Holly Sanders' article, "Pepsi Squeezes Arnell" in The New York Post.)

Tropicana Thunder

After mere weeks in the market, Tropicana is discontinuing packaging introduced in January, and reverting to its previous design (see below). 

The  reversal comes on the heels of consumer complaints that disparaged the new design and clamored for a return of the original look.

According to an article in The New York Times, people described the new packaging as “ugly” or “stupid,” and resembling “a generic bargain brand” or a “store brand.”  Others described the redesign as making it more difficult to distinguish among the varieties of Tropicana juices.

Tropicana is yielding to public opinion not because of the volume of compaints (they are supposedly limited overall) but because they came from loyal consumers according to Neil Campbell, president at Tropicana North America.

“We underestimated the deep emotional bond” they had with the original packaging, Campbell stated. “Those consumers are very important to us, so we responded.”

“What we didn’t get was the passion this very loyal small group of consumers have. That wasn’t something that came out in the research,” said Campbell.

“I’m incredibly surprised by the reaction,” said Peter Arnell, chairman of Arnell Group, the firm that conceived Tropicana's new packaging.

Since Campbell and Arnell were blind to core brand equities and consumers' emotional attachments to them, the push for the package redesign must have started someplace artificial, someplace other than the marketplace.  Research is often used to validate pre-existing hypotheses and that seems to be the case here.  Otherwise these experienced, well-paid people would not have so grossly misread Tropicana's brand franchise.