No matter how much thought goes into a design (pre- or post-creation) designers need to take themselves out of the equation and think of packaging in terms that the average consumer can relate to. No matter how much you want them to, the average consumer simply doesn’t think “wow… squeezing this cap really brings me back to the emotional connection I have to squeezing an actual orange, like a warm hug from my grandmother when I was a child… blah blah blah.” The average consumer thinks “neat-o. The cap looks like an orange.” Then they twist it open and drink. Done. (Or more likely they think “WTF… how do I open this damn thing? I’m missing Superstars of Dance!)
Really great design is often utilitarian, and should be presented this way to our clients. (We designers aren’t impressing anyone with our vast knowledge of rhetoric.) More often than not packaging serves a very, very basic purpose: it needs to stand out on store shelves so Joe Consumer can find the product at a quick glance even when bombarded by a mess of colorful competitors. Now, I’m not saying you can’t accomplish this task in a pleasing, “designerly” way… quite the contrary. What I am saying is be careful not to over-think. To coin a phrase… “if you have to explain the joke, it’s not funny.” This Tropicana redesign is a classic example of a designer’s inability to edit their thinking.
Maybe it is over-thinking…. but maybe it’s just an attempt to change imagery that was so strong to begin with. Or perhaps in the case of Tropicana, imagery that everyone was so accustom to. I think people would have rejected change in this case regardless of how good it was, or was not. Reminds me of when Coca-Cola tried to mess around with its logo several times…even calling it just “Coke”, instead of Cola-Cola. I believe the new branding was scrapped just b/c the old one was so strong. Now the “Coca-cola” classic logo is embedded into the newer products (like “Zero”) rather than the other way around.
For me the argument is less about whether or not the redesign is effective (or necessary), and more about the designer’s intention. There are many, many re-brands that are effective regardless of the iconic status of the original brand. Tropicana is no exception. Hell… the orange with the straw in it is a relatively recent addition to their packaging based on a successful tv ad campaign several years back. (Link: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/image/s_tropicana-orange-juice.jpg) The current packaging isn’t so strong that there’s no room to move in a new direction. This design team just got hung up in all the wrong details, like the tactile quality of the orange cap, for example. That’s the wrong focus - they lost site of the big picture.