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What seems to be lost in these “redesigns” is the why: why are you doing it? If there isn’t a list of benefits long enough to justify the cost and possible ris

What seems to be lost in these “redesigns” is the why: why are you doing it? If there isn’t a list of benefits long enough to justify the cost and possible risk, well, that’s a problem. There’s also a tendency for companies to be super proud of what they’ve done so they neglect methods like A/B testing and instead just bet the farm on their great new design. After all, it cost a lot of money and looks cool to the decision-makers so what could go wrong? Um, maybe before you throw out all of your packaging everywhere and double-down, you could tone it down a little and try it out in a few small markets first? Then watch and see if sales are going up or down? Then think about going further? And at this point there is also a tendency to ignore history. This is far from the first big failed redesign; what is going on that no one is looking at past failures (plenty of which have had high costs to other brands too), and imagining that there might be a downside?

userbinator 4y ago
I suspect the "why" is most simply explained by "because designers had to justify their salaries."
- hbosch 4y ago
  In my experience, the "why" is more often called by a manager, director, or VP who wants a big project under their belt. The amount of times a "major design change" has happened from the bottom-up is very, very, almost impossibly rare in most cases. Sad story, but a true story.
  - firecall 4y ago
    This is correct. Management gets bored. Source: Me, previously a Big Brand Marketing Manager
    - strunz 4y ago
      Not bored as much as "I need a big project to parlay into a VP/Executive role"
- irrational 4y ago
  I worked on a website that was completely redesigned every few years. We, the developers, didn’t understand why until one of the business people, who was leaving for a new job, admitted to us that they (the business management team) mainly did it because it was fun, because it let them expense meetings/travel/food doing “research” and meeting with design consultants, because it gave them something to do other than their real (hard) job of getting 3rd parties to use the current website, because it gave them something to report to their managers, etc.
  - nkozyra 4y ago
    Preface: I think a lot of us - particularly developers - have a tendency to mock/devalue what people in design and UI/UX do. I think there's incredible value in what they do and part of that is keeping sites from going stale. I believe that in general people get fatigue from seeing the same design day-in, day-out. There's a cost to not changing. Or at least a trade-off. The risk is when redesign is carte blanche for the design team to do things that they think are pretty without the requisite user testing and data to back up decisions. Major design changes should come with a nice set of data to support them.
    - Agentlien 4y ago
      For a lot of websites I visit frequently what I want is ease of use and familiarity. Redesigns are often a bother since I need to learn to navigate the new site. For sites I don't visit as often I likely won't really notice a redesign.
      - Closi 4y ago
        As a counterpoint, Facebook got criticism for each redesign but if they kept their 2001 aesthetic it would look and feel incredibly dated now.
        Agentlien 4y ago
        I haven't had a Facebook account for many years now, but I remember that what bothered me about their redesigns wasn't how they changed visuals to keep up to date. It was a rapid series of restructurings which meant you always felt you didn't know where to find things.
- cawlin 4y ago
  As the rebrand was outsourced (like most rebrands) the "why" is absolutely not so designers can justify their salaries. Design as a department is very often under resourced and I'd take a strong wager that the designers who actually work for Tropicana were dreading all the unnecessary work this rebrand was surely going to generate for them.
- Spivak 4y ago
  This is always used as an excuse but it ignores that rebrands like this rarely come from in-house designers. Execs will contact an outside design firm and ask for a rebrand, spend obscene amounts of money (relative to the size of the company) and then hand the design to the in-house designers to execute on it and turn the mock ups into actual usable assets.
- moistly 4y ago
  I am absolutely certain that this explains the changes to the iOS Safari changes. Someone justified their existence in Apple by moving the close button in the mini fixed tabs display from the left—the side it’s displayed on the tabs themselves—to the right.
deleted 4y ago
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toss1 4y ago
Yup. The "Why?" question gets lost among the impulse to be 'clean and modern'. >>Tropicana’s original packaging had rich colours and a strong visual hierarchy. On the other hand, the new packaging failed to impress the consumers, with clean lines, a lack of visuals, transforming the once indistinguishable orange juice into a “generic store brand” product. This same thing happens in everything else too, such as automotive controls and web design. The damn "designers" are so infatuated with their "principles" of design and aesthetics that they completely ignore the fact that DESIGN IS SECONDARY TO FUNCTION — if you make it stop working, your design sucks, no matter how good you think it looks. Whether you make it harder to notice the brand that I've always associated with good fruit juice, harder to find the controls to my automobile by touch while the windshield is fogging with blinding glare of oncoming cars, or just harder to find a common function on your web page/app, IDGAF how aesthetically pleasing, clean, or hip your "design is" — you had one job and you FAILED. How designers and their teachers and managers can so consistently and massively fail to understand that fundamental concept is just baffling.
- jan_Inkepa 4y ago
  I wonder if some of the "why" isn't the general turn against straws in the current zeitgeist.
  - codys 4y ago
    The article indicates the re-design in question was "launched" in January 2008. This is the date where planning the redesign began. Another article [1] indicates that the new design was deployed on January 8th, 2009, and Tropicana announced a return to the old design on February 23rd, 2009. A quick search shows an article [2] indicating around 2018 was when the panic around plastic straws began (with, for example, Seattle banning plastic straws starting in July 2018). So in this case, the plastic straw issue does necessarily appear to be related to the redesign. 1: https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2015/05/what-to-learn-from-tropicanas-packaging-redesign-failure/ https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2015/05/what-to-learn-fro... 2: https://www.eater.com/2018/7/12/17555880/plastic-straws-environment-pollution-banned-alternatives-ocean-sea-turtle-viral-video https://www.eater.com/2018/7/12/17555880/plastic-straws-envi...
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
The "why" was pretty clearly explained in TFA: > One of the main reasons for rebranding/redesigning is for brands to reconnect with existing consumers and reach out to new ones. The notable point here IMO is not "why did they do it?" but "how/why did it fail so badly?"
- mannykannot 4y ago
  That would have been the fallacy of unjustifiably arguing from the general to the specific. What you have stated are arguments why a company might choose to rebrand. They are not arguments that Tropicana should have done it, and not when it did. My guess is that the marketing people drank too deeply of their own Kool-Aid, so to speak.
- stickfigure 4y ago
  "reconnect with existing consumers and reach out to new ones" is management consultant bullshit like "leverage our synergies to enhance the client experience". It means nothing. TFA did not explain anything. You also don't "reconnect with existing customers" by changing the brand.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    "the brand" is ill-defined. Is it the name "Tropicana" or is it the design of the packaging? In this case, it turned out to be the latter more than the former. There are other cases where the name is retained through a total redesign without this sort of damage. While I half-agree on the BS level in that quote, in another sense I think it's totally obvious what they meant: consumers who already buy tropicana become inured to the brand identity - a redesign gets them actively thinking about the choice to buy tropicana while shopping; consumers who do not buy tropicana for some vague, non-specific reason may be tempted to try it after the redesign, either because they merely notice the package more, or find it more appealing.
    - bambax 4y ago
      > In this case, it turned out to be the latter more than the former. That conclusion is not obvious. On the new packaging, the brand is much less visible, all one sees is a big promise about "orange" (like Agent Orange?) so it could be that people were looking for the brand name, and took that opportunity to switch.
qq66 4y ago
Well sometimes "why" is just to stay current. When I was a kid I thought those dated-looking boxes of "JIFFY" cake mix were actually boxes that nobody had bought and had been sitting there for 30 years.
filmgirlcw 4y ago
I mean, as risky and brand and logo redesigns are, there is often a need to want to modernize or revitalize your logo or mark or packaging. It’s more difficult, the larger/older/more iconic your packaging is. That’s why the best logo and branding and packaging redesigns tend to either be the most iterative or have changed early in a product/brand’s lifecycle before he could be too associated with a company. The Tropicana redesign was a total failure — but there is a story where you could have had a redesign that left essential elements (the orange with the straw at the center), with a slightly updated/modernized logo or typeface, and it could have been successful. Successful rebrands and redesigns don’t get the same attention as the failures because they are successful. But there are a number that are fairly radical — Airbnb, I was definitely in the camp that hated their new logo and branding at first, but it has worked. Coca-Cola consistently has some of the best adjustments to its logo and packaging, subtle but powerful (New Coke being the exception that absolutely proves the rule). Apple and Microsoft have both had very good redesigns — Apple has used the same logo shape for decades, but it has changed font and color of the logo. Kroger is a more recent example of an exemplary rebrand. Going too far, and in this case, making your core packaging impossible for buyers to recognize is absolutely a problem and a disaster — but rebranding or updating branding is often a very good thing for a business, especially when it is subtle enough for the consumer to not notice or to just notice that it now looks more elegant or fresher.
- mark-r 4y ago
  One of my favorite graphics is this one detailing the evolution of the Pepsi logo vs. the Coca-Cola logo: https://flowingdata.com/2009/08/13/pepsi-and-coca-cola-logo-design-over-the-past-hundred-years/ https://flowingdata.com/2009/08/13/pepsi-and-coca-cola-logo-... Of course it was over-dramatized for effect, and the truth emerges further down the page. But it's close enough to true that it stops and makes you think.
  - filmgirlcw 4y ago
    Yes!! I mentioned this meme in another comment because it is also one of my favorites! Coca-Cola has some of the best branding work of all time. It’s also interesting to see how iconic the branding is even in non-English countries. You can see a Coke logo in any country and know what the product is. It’s just superb.
kwatsonafter 4y ago
To sort of riff off what you're saying; there might be some serious social, "whys" driving the more material, "why" of lackluster brand re-designs in the last 20 years. It seems like as companies are bought up by private equity groups (PAI Partners in Tropicana's case) quality and brand identity suffer. You really see this all over the place and another bad recession could reshuffle the board enough to let private wealth groups buy up what's left of the United States' viable domestic cultural export. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAI_Partners https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAI_Partners
StanislavPetrov 4y ago
> What seems to be lost in these “redesigns” is the why: why are you doing it? If there isn’t a list of benefits long enough to justify the cost and possible risk, well, that’s a problem. Exactly. Unless your brand is in trouble or you are trying to deflect the attention from some sort of scandal the odds of losing existing customers from a successful business is far higher than the odds of attracting new customers because you have changed your packaging.
raverbashing 4y ago
You can't (and shouldn't) A/B a redesign. There is much more than "this one is better than the other one" (to some random passer-bys)
Nextgrid 4y ago
> why are you doing it? Because people need more salary/bonuses/consulting fees/resume fodder and will constantly push for it, making up various bullshit to justify it. Sometimes it goes through and a redesign project is started, and once started, it's very hard to turn back while saving face.
Kaotique 4y ago
I think a lot of times a redesign is simply used as a tool for a manager/exec to have an impact, any impact really. It does not matter so much if the net result is positive or negative. It looks good on their resume. "Joined company X and spearheading redesign project of X". Designer companies love it, they can let their imagination run wild and the managers will gobble up whatever they come up with. This happens on all levels really. If it is a huge company like Pepsi or Tropicana or for example my high school which "rebranded" and all the students including me had to stamp thousands and thousands of exam paper with the new logo.
- donarb 4y ago
  If I were the hiring manager, the first question I'd asked is, what were the results of that redesign?
lm28469 4y ago
> What seems to be lost in these “redesigns” is the why: why are you doing it? If there isn’t a list of benefits long enough to justify the cost and possible risk, well, that’s a problem. I ask that to myself every single time I update my mac or pixel 3 phone. The UX gets worse and worse every year, and just when you finally start to get used to it they decide to change things again. I guess they need to keep internal teams busy 24/7. I've seen it in many companies, people keep throwing A/B tests, see what seem to improve the experience by negligible amount (most of the time their tests are skewed anyways so it doesn't really matter), then they spent millions and hundreds of man hours to move a few buttons and make a few lines of text bigger/smaller. When they deploy it the impact is either inexistent or negative, people get fired, new managers get hired, and they start again.
throwaway0a5e 4y ago
>What seems to be lost in these “redesigns” is the why: why are you doing it? If there isn’t a list of benefits long enough to justify the cost and possible risk, well, that’s a problem If you have a painter on staff shit will get painted. If there's not a lot of shit that really needs painting some shit that doesn't need painting will get painted. If you keep graphic designers (or better yet, someone who's managing a group of designers) on staff...

userbinator 4y ago

I suspect the "why" is most simply explained by "because designers had to justify their salaries."

hbosch 4y ago
In my experience, the "why" is more often called by a manager, director, or VP who wants a big project under their belt. The amount of times a "major design change" has happened from the bottom-up is very, very, almost impossibly rare in most cases. Sad story, but a true story.
- firecall 4y ago
  This is correct. Management gets bored. Source: Me, previously a Big Brand Marketing Manager
  - strunz 4y ago
    Not bored as much as "I need a big project to parlay into a VP/Executive role"
irrational 4y ago
I worked on a website that was completely redesigned every few years. We, the developers, didn’t understand why until one of the business people, who was leaving for a new job, admitted to us that they (the business management team) mainly did it because it was fun, because it let them expense meetings/travel/food doing “research” and meeting with design consultants, because it gave them something to do other than their real (hard) job of getting 3rd parties to use the current website, because it gave them something to report to their managers, etc.
- nkozyra 4y ago
  Preface: I think a lot of us - particularly developers - have a tendency to mock/devalue what people in design and UI/UX do. I think there's incredible value in what they do and part of that is keeping sites from going stale. I believe that in general people get fatigue from seeing the same design day-in, day-out. There's a cost to not changing. Or at least a trade-off. The risk is when redesign is carte blanche for the design team to do things that they think are pretty without the requisite user testing and data to back up decisions. Major design changes should come with a nice set of data to support them.
  - Agentlien 4y ago
    For a lot of websites I visit frequently what I want is ease of use and familiarity. Redesigns are often a bother since I need to learn to navigate the new site. For sites I don't visit as often I likely won't really notice a redesign.
    - Closi 4y ago
      As a counterpoint, Facebook got criticism for each redesign but if they kept their 2001 aesthetic it would look and feel incredibly dated now.
      - Agentlien 4y ago
        I haven't had a Facebook account for many years now, but I remember that what bothered me about their redesigns wasn't how they changed visuals to keep up to date. It was a rapid series of restructurings which meant you always felt you didn't know where to find things.
cawlin 4y ago
As the rebrand was outsourced (like most rebrands) the "why" is absolutely not so designers can justify their salaries. Design as a department is very often under resourced and I'd take a strong wager that the designers who actually work for Tropicana were dreading all the unnecessary work this rebrand was surely going to generate for them.
Spivak 4y ago
This is always used as an excuse but it ignores that rebrands like this rarely come from in-house designers. Execs will contact an outside design firm and ask for a rebrand, spend obscene amounts of money (relative to the size of the company) and then hand the design to the in-house designers to execute on it and turn the mock ups into actual usable assets.
moistly 4y ago
I am absolutely certain that this explains the changes to the iOS Safari changes. Someone justified their existence in Apple by moving the close button in the mini fixed tabs display from the left—the side it’s displayed on the tabs themselves—to the right.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

toss1 4y ago

Yup. The "Why?" question gets lost among the impulse to be 'clean and modern'. >>Tropicana’s original packaging had rich colours and a strong visual hierarchy. On the other hand, the new packaging failed to impress the consumers, with clean lines, a lack of visuals, transforming the once indistinguishable orange juice into a “generic store brand” product. This same thing happens in everything else too, such as automotive controls and web design. The damn "designers" are so infatuated with their "principles" of design and aesthetics that they completely ignore the fact that DESIGN IS SECONDARY TO FUNCTION — if you make it stop working, your design sucks, no matter how good you think it looks. Whether you make it harder to notice the brand that I've always associated with good fruit juice, harder to find the controls to my automobile by touch while the windshield is fogging with blinding glare of oncoming cars, or just harder to find a common function on your web page/app, IDGAF how aesthetically pleasing, clean, or hip your "design is" — you had one job and you FAILED. How designers and their teachers and managers can so consistently and massively fail to understand that fundamental concept is just baffling.

jan_Inkepa 4y ago
I wonder if some of the "why" isn't the general turn against straws in the current zeitgeist.
- codys 4y ago
  The article indicates the re-design in question was "launched" in January 2008. This is the date where planning the redesign began. Another article [1] indicates that the new design was deployed on January 8th, 2009, and Tropicana announced a return to the old design on February 23rd, 2009. A quick search shows an article [2] indicating around 2018 was when the panic around plastic straws began (with, for example, Seattle banning plastic straws starting in July 2018). So in this case, the plastic straw issue does necessarily appear to be related to the redesign. 1: https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2015/05/what-to-learn-from-tropicanas-packaging-redesign-failure/ https://www.thebrandingjournal.com/2015/05/what-to-learn-fro... 2: https://www.eater.com/2018/7/12/17555880/plastic-straws-environment-pollution-banned-alternatives-ocean-sea-turtle-viral-video https://www.eater.com/2018/7/12/17555880/plastic-straws-envi...

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago

The "why" was pretty clearly explained in TFA: > One of the main reasons for rebranding/redesigning is for brands to reconnect with existing consumers and reach out to new ones. The notable point here IMO is not "why did they do it?" but "how/why did it fail so badly?"

mannykannot 4y ago
That would have been the fallacy of unjustifiably arguing from the general to the specific. What you have stated are arguments why a company might choose to rebrand. They are not arguments that Tropicana should have done it, and not when it did. My guess is that the marketing people drank too deeply of their own Kool-Aid, so to speak.
stickfigure 4y ago
"reconnect with existing consumers and reach out to new ones" is management consultant bullshit like "leverage our synergies to enhance the client experience". It means nothing. TFA did not explain anything. You also don't "reconnect with existing customers" by changing the brand.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  "the brand" is ill-defined. Is it the name "Tropicana" or is it the design of the packaging? In this case, it turned out to be the latter more than the former. There are other cases where the name is retained through a total redesign without this sort of damage. While I half-agree on the BS level in that quote, in another sense I think it's totally obvious what they meant: consumers who already buy tropicana become inured to the brand identity - a redesign gets them actively thinking about the choice to buy tropicana while shopping; consumers who do not buy tropicana for some vague, non-specific reason may be tempted to try it after the redesign, either because they merely notice the package more, or find it more appealing.
  - bambax 4y ago
    > In this case, it turned out to be the latter more than the former. That conclusion is not obvious. On the new packaging, the brand is much less visible, all one sees is a big promise about "orange" (like Agent Orange?) so it could be that people were looking for the brand name, and took that opportunity to switch.

qq66 4y ago

Well sometimes "why" is just to stay current. When I was a kid I thought those dated-looking boxes of "JIFFY" cake mix were actually boxes that nobody had bought and had been sitting there for 30 years.

filmgirlcw 4y ago

I mean, as risky and brand and logo redesigns are, there is often a need to want to modernize or revitalize your logo or mark or packaging. It’s more difficult, the larger/older/more iconic your packaging is. That’s why the best logo and branding and packaging redesigns tend to either be the most iterative or have changed early in a product/brand’s lifecycle before he could be too associated with a company. The Tropicana redesign was a total failure — but there is a story where you could have had a redesign that left essential elements (the orange with the straw at the center), with a slightly updated/modernized logo or typeface, and it could have been successful. Successful rebrands and redesigns don’t get the same attention as the failures because they are successful. But there are a number that are fairly radical — Airbnb, I was definitely in the camp that hated their new logo and branding at first, but it has worked. Coca-Cola consistently has some of the best adjustments to its logo and packaging, subtle but powerful (New Coke being the exception that absolutely proves the rule). Apple and Microsoft have both had very good redesigns — Apple has used the same logo shape for decades, but it has changed font and color of the logo. Kroger is a more recent example of an exemplary rebrand. Going too far, and in this case, making your core packaging impossible for buyers to recognize is absolutely a problem and a disaster — but rebranding or updating branding is often a very good thing for a business, especially when it is subtle enough for the consumer to not notice or to just notice that it now looks more elegant or fresher.

mark-r 4y ago
One of my favorite graphics is this one detailing the evolution of the Pepsi logo vs. the Coca-Cola logo: https://flowingdata.com/2009/08/13/pepsi-and-coca-cola-logo-design-over-the-past-hundred-years/ https://flowingdata.com/2009/08/13/pepsi-and-coca-cola-logo-... Of course it was over-dramatized for effect, and the truth emerges further down the page. But it's close enough to true that it stops and makes you think.
- filmgirlcw 4y ago
  Yes!! I mentioned this meme in another comment because it is also one of my favorites! Coca-Cola has some of the best branding work of all time. It’s also interesting to see how iconic the branding is even in non-English countries. You can see a Coke logo in any country and know what the product is. It’s just superb.

kwatsonafter 4y ago

To sort of riff off what you're saying; there might be some serious social, "whys" driving the more material, "why" of lackluster brand re-designs in the last 20 years. It seems like as companies are bought up by private equity groups (PAI Partners in Tropicana's case) quality and brand identity suffer. You really see this all over the place and another bad recession could reshuffle the board enough to let private wealth groups buy up what's left of the United States' viable domestic cultural export. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAI_Partners https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAI_Partners

StanislavPetrov 4y ago

> What seems to be lost in these “redesigns” is the why: why are you doing it? If there isn’t a list of benefits long enough to justify the cost and possible risk, well, that’s a problem. Exactly. Unless your brand is in trouble or you are trying to deflect the attention from some sort of scandal the odds of losing existing customers from a successful business is far higher than the odds of attracting new customers because you have changed your packaging.

raverbashing 4y ago

You can't (and shouldn't) A/B a redesign. There is much more than "this one is better than the other one" (to some random passer-bys)

Nextgrid 4y ago

> why are you doing it? Because people need more salary/bonuses/consulting fees/resume fodder and will constantly push for it, making up various bullshit to justify it. Sometimes it goes through and a redesign project is started, and once started, it's very hard to turn back while saving face.

Kaotique 4y ago

I think a lot of times a redesign is simply used as a tool for a manager/exec to have an impact, any impact really. It does not matter so much if the net result is positive or negative. It looks good on their resume. "Joined company X and spearheading redesign project of X". Designer companies love it, they can let their imagination run wild and the managers will gobble up whatever they come up with. This happens on all levels really. If it is a huge company like Pepsi or Tropicana or for example my high school which "rebranded" and all the students including me had to stamp thousands and thousands of exam paper with the new logo.

donarb 4y ago
If I were the hiring manager, the first question I'd asked is, what were the results of that redesign?

lm28469 4y ago

> What seems to be lost in these “redesigns” is the why: why are you doing it? If there isn’t a list of benefits long enough to justify the cost and possible risk, well, that’s a problem. I ask that to myself every single time I update my mac or pixel 3 phone. The UX gets worse and worse every year, and just when you finally start to get used to it they decide to change things again. I guess they need to keep internal teams busy 24/7. I've seen it in many companies, people keep throwing A/B tests, see what seem to improve the experience by negligible amount (most of the time their tests are skewed anyways so it doesn't really matter), then they spent millions and hundreds of man hours to move a few buttons and make a few lines of text bigger/smaller. When they deploy it the impact is either inexistent or negative, people get fired, new managers get hired, and they start again.

throwaway0a5e 4y ago

>What seems to be lost in these “redesigns” is the why: why are you doing it? If there isn’t a list of benefits long enough to justify the cost and possible risk, well, that’s a problem If you have a painter on staff shit will get painted. If there's not a lot of shit that really needs painting some shit that doesn't need painting will get painted. If you keep graphic designers (or better yet, someone who's managing a group of designers) on staff...