For the second time in 15 years, Tropicana has alienated its loyal consumers with a package redesign that’s been met with unfavorable reviews and a significant drain on the bottom line. Sales were reportedly down 19% through October with a 4% loss in market share, following a 2009 debacle that drove a 20% drop in sales.
How did this happen again? How did Tropicana misunderstand its consumers for a second time?
We don’t know the nature of Tropicana’s research methodology and the findings. But looking at other scenarios likely provides some insight. And some learnings – not just for packaging but anyone whose success depends on understanding consumer sentiment.
Most research into branding, including packaging, often centers on focus groups, surveys or interviews. While studies using self-report measures may have advantages, they have disadvantages given how humans behave. Results have been shown to be influenced by social desirability bias, memory, response bias, confirmation bias, current state of mind, etc.
In this situation, we suspect there may be two primary challenges at work: Context and human processing:
Context
These studies often lack context and are subject to inherent human biases. The new cartons, on their own, may be just fine for those in a focus group. But how does that translate to a shelf and with pricing and competition?
Human processing
Consumers are notoriously unreliable when describing their preferences or decision-making processes – because so much of that happens nonconsciously. By using biosensor technologies to measure physiological and neural signals, brands can measure the attention, emotions and engagement that are central to decision-making.
Tropicana brand representatives have said publicly that they conducted research on hundreds of designs, and landed on the new size and design as a result of consumer feedback. But if we’ve learned anything in developing the best ways to really understand consumer sentiment, it’s that consumers don’t, or can’t, always say what they really mean.
One of the clearest examples of this may come from Duracell. For decades, the company – like every other entity in the battery industry – accepted, and developed products around, an apparent truth: That customers wanted batteries with long life (cue the Energizer bunny).
Except, that’s not really what they wanted
The company uncovered this when a couple of its marketers decided to test consumer noticeability in a series of studies that gathered explicit and implicit responses. When all of it was collected, synchronized and analyzed with iMotions, the team learned something remarkable: consumers wanted something different. Consistent high power, not battery life, was the priority. The findings led to a foundational shift in everything from R&D through to sales and marketing.
This lack of true consumer understanding is around us everyday
Consider that every year, 80% of the 30,000 new products brought to market end up failing. The main culprit isn’t necessarily a lack of testing, but insufficient testing – which often centers on internal validation within the company rather than true independent testing of consumers.
Or consider menus, which essentially package up a restaurant’s products. Several of our customers have helped partners unlock significant increases in revenue by re-evaluating how consumers engaged with their menus. Humans just don’t consume menus as most expect (i.e., left-to-right and top-to-bottom). Rather, people spend the most time looking at the first, second and last dishes on the menu. This is what 1775 Texas Pit BBQ, a restaurant in College Station, Texas, found in a study with Texas A&M University that used eye tracking technology to understand visual attention. Moving the most profitable items to those spots on the menu led to a 20% increase in sales.
What these have in common is that they deployed studies designed to look deeper than just what consumers can consciously convey. They used some combination of:
- Facial expression analysis to understand how audiences emotionally engaged with products, services and packages
- Eye tracking technology to pinpoint where audiences focus their attention and for how long – not only understanding what they see – but also what they don’t.
- Biometric sensors to see physiological responses that help to understand whether a product or packaging is appealing
Unfortunately, we suspect there are a lot of good products that fail not because of the value or utility of the product itself. But because companies don’t put their consumers at the very center of their research, creating a potential mismatch in packaging, messaging or some other factor that fails to resonate.
What all of this demonstrates is that human sentiment cannot truly be understood by asking people how they think or feel. But by using advanced behavioral and biometric data, companies can gain a true understanding of how consumers will react to their product, their packaging, and their messaging. This understanding can lead to significant changes or even small tweaks that can save, or gain, millions of dollars.
