No wonder our industry is in such a funk. A while back I stumbled upon the redesign of Tropicana in a store over here. I thought it looked cheap and nasty and so did a few other people after I posted a comment about it on my tumblr. After barely a few months PepsiCo are reverting to the old design. That’s a monumental f**k up.

The same branding company – Arnell – that is currently embroiled in the $1m or is it $10m Pepsi redesign farce is behind the Tropicana work. As I said in my original post I could probably write something very lengthy about the complexities of design and meta language and loads of artsy fartsy nonsense (which it seems Peter Arnell is something of a God at) but fundamentally anyone with a brain can surely see that the old design worked well and the new design looks pale by

comparison.

I suppose marketing departments and agencies exist (and make money) through doing things like this but Tropicana is such a strong brand – why fix something that ain’t broke? If they felt like they needed to freshen the brand up a little why not pour all that money into New Product Development, CSR or do something cool in the digital space?

I don’t get it. Can anyone enlighten me?