It’s my pleasure to bring our readers another wonderful new voice, that of Alexandra Gergar, a great photographer, vegetarian cook, and marketing major at the University of Pittsburgh. Alex’s focus in Thinking Big Works, as you can tell from the banner, is the intersection of food and design, now coming to you on Saturdays.

David VanAmburg

Food & Design: redesign mis-steps

CLEAN AND SIMPLE

With clean bold lines, a beautiful typeface and no pictures, you would think that Tropicana’s carton redesign should have been hailed as work of imagination.  Should have been…

THE REDESIGN OF TROPICANA

In late 2008, Tropicana launched a new package design, and these new cartons hit grocers’ shelves around the country.  Almost immediately, a public outcry criticized the new brand design from the parent company PespiCo.  All across the web people negatively responded to Tropicana and its move towards their modern design. By February 23, Tropicana had an official recall of all of the newly designed cartons.

WHY DID THIS REDESIGN FAIL?
Ultimately, this new product design was unrecognizable.  For two decades Tropicana had the serif font, pure orange label and the beloved orange with the straw.  When they removed these three iconic references from the package, the customer became confused.  I know when I was looking for my “pulp free” variety I had to do a double take.  Spending seconds trying to decipher the carton to make sure it was:
a.) my brand of orange juice
b.) I correctly found my variety.

It was thoughtful concept of Tropicana to color code their varieties for “pulp free”, “some pulp”, “calcium” etc., but this just added to the confusion.  I was left with several choices that just overwhelmed me.  In fact, while I stood there trying to figure out which color was my “pulp free” I watched a woman come back and exchange one variety for another. When your customers have a hard time recognizing your product variation, what does that say about your package design?

CUSTOMERS HAVE THE ULTIMATE VOICE
As our world becomes smaller through social networking and viral opinions, individual brand contact with it’s customers is more connected and therefore more apt to intelligent criticism   Brands should expect customer reaction when they make drastic changes regarding their brand image.  Tropicana experienced this first hand, with a large backlash when blogs and online articles condemned this PepsiCo rebranding strategy.  The social media circuit lit up for the weeks following the launch of the redesigned cartons.  The public outcry was so overwhelming, that in just a few short months, Tropicana recalled their packaging decision.

TROPICANA WILL SERVE AS A WARNING FLAG
No brand wants to do what Coca-Cola did in 1985.  Modernizing your brand is a way to bring in new customers as well as keep your current client base interested in your product.  However, when you stray too far away from what your customers hold as the core of your brand, you have misunderstood what your customers demand.

Regardless of what Tropicana has done for the package design, the juice is still the same great taste.  Tropicana has loyal following and that is why there was strong reaction to this design change.

FYI: Tropicana spent $35 million for this design and promotion.

Alex graduates from the University of Pittsburgh with a BS in marketing and finance.  Cooking since she was a child, she now  a food blog called Lemons In Water.

Product design is a conversation with your audience, why not blog in the same manner?

Alex Gergar

research: crowd-sourcing prediction software

CUSTOMERS TALK. DO YOU LISTEN?

One of my favorite themes in life has become the critical need and great value of letting your customers TRULY communicate with you.

So I was going to write a simple post today about online prediction software used for crowd-sourcing [Wikipedia] (leveraging mass collaboration) But, like most of my thoughts, it twisted and turned a bit. So I tried to unravel it for you here.

RHEINGOLD’S MIND

I first fell in love with Howard Rheingold’s mind [Wikipedia] when he took his turn editing the Whole Earth Review. He was one of so many thinkers and doers who interacted with the great works of Steward Brand. [Wikipedia]

Periodically, I check Howard’s site to see what he’s focusing on. He bumped his fame with his 2003 book Smartmobs: The Next Social Revolution. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution parallels much of our early work at MutualGravity creating functional online platforms. Howard has been trying to build his own social network platform for years.

Related to that, I’ve embedded his current video about web videos on his vlog. It a simple, visual overview of video on the web.

LETTING THE CROWD TELL YOU YOUR BUSINESS

Predictify is one of many open social networks built on the idea that the crowd can predict the future, participants can build a reputation based on their accuracy, and marketers can post questions to collect actionable data.

It’s one of many twists on traditional marketing research approach being tested by companies. Like most approaches, one of our key concerns wraps around statistical validity. Can you trust this sample of people and this methodology to bring you accurate enough information for you to make multi-million dollar decisions on it? We’ll come back to that issue next Tuesday. We’ll simplify the jargon, and give you the information and tools you need to understand validity to do research correctly.

In the meantime, there’s a lot of potential in letting your constituents, or the whole world, give you their best guess into the future.

WANT TO EXPLORE FOR YOURSELF OR YOUR BUSINESS?

Begin with a comparison of online prediction software used for crowd-sourcing. It’s a bit dated, but there’s a good discussion of various online prediction software on Mercury Research and Consulting’s Mercury’s Blog on prediction markets.

David VanAmburg’s involvement with marketing research began in 1968 when he was hired as a research analyst with technology leader, Lord Corporation. Since 1977, he has provided over 2,000 research studies for clients in 165 industries, designed the first national hunger study for America’s Second Harvest, and taught MBA courses in the subject. He loves designing research studies and analyzing results.

VanAmburg Group and MutualGravity design automated real-time marketing research and customer feedback systems for large and small corporations, from utility customers to hospital patients to restaurant patrons, and more. What can we implement for you?

Web Marketing: VanAmburgGroup.com

THANK GOD OUR NEW SITE IS UP

Over the years, we created and managed a lot of websites for clients, and focused on creation of MutualGravity’s software platform, leaving some of our own sites to collect dust.

Until a few weeks ago, VanAmburgGroup.com was untouched since 1999. Yet that was our public presence, our 24/7 communications with the world. If you saw the old site, you probably thought we were on a long cruise or something.

So this quarter we revamped the the entire site:

1. To share hundreds of pages of practical research, planning and marketing information,
2. To communicate some of the exciting projects we’re working on, and
3. To bring in some of our global partners.

In this process, I’ve committed to being transparent with our site development and search optimization.

Starting today, every Monday I’ll share some of our related accomplishments and challenges. On Wednesdays, we’ll offer web design and SEO nuggets for your use.

THE BLOG SCHEDULE

But before I jump in to the site development discussion, here’s what to expect with the Thinking Big Works blog.

For the main site:

• Check the chart above for the full schedule. We’ll also add posts beyond those categories and days.
• To simplify your reading experience, every post will have a category header, so you can easily choose which ones you want to read. The first line of each post will give a bit more information on what it’s about.
• Author Judy Berg now posts daily. As of today, I’ll be posting daily. Noted management consultant, Greg Pashke will begin regular posts next week. And SEO specialist, Jody Resnick, will be sharing his insights beginning in January.

Read more about current and upcoming site features below the fold.

HERE’S WHERE WE ARE WITH THE SITE

For the main site:

• We’ve completed about 70 pages of information most with charts, and will add 5-10 a week, and post the new ones every Monday.
• We’ve completed about 50% of our search optimization. We’ll share that wonderful process on Wednesdays.
• Friday of this week we’ll launch a video tour of the site to help you access the practical info you need.
• Starting next week, we’ll add white papers, slide overviews, and other detailed info for your research, planning, marketing, and web marketing use.

WHY ENLIGHTENED ORGANIZATIONS

On Mondays and Tuesdays, Judy Berg and I will be sharing a public conversation about one of the most exciting trends you will witness in the worlds of business and government.

We all experience the daily revelations of greed, corruption and other mistakes made by individuals in the recent past. There are enough news and commentary outlets discussing examples of these sad affairs. You may have lost 50% of your retirement savings so far, but we’re all just beginning to experience the fallout of these actions. Yes, there will be more.

But our focus is what comes beyond the chaos that fixates the nightly news. There are amazing people who have created amazing organizations over the past 30+ years. They are the ones who will redefine our economy, our world society, our reality – and not in a few generations.

Starting in January:

• We’ll be interviewing 100+ of the leading thinkers on the planet.
• You can join in on our Enlightenors’ Cafe online conversations, which we’ll announce soon.

Want more on our near and medium-term projections for the economy and how it will affect your business? Keep reading Thinking Big Works. Thanks.

Best wishes,
David