The first rule of marketing should always be, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." But marketing people always look at things as broken, whether they are or not, because then they can get credit for fixing it.

But when the "fix" is roundly rejected by the consumer, then what?

For PepsiCo, the answer in the case of its Tropicana orange juice brand is to go back to what worked before. The New York Times reports that after numerous complaints that the two-month-old package design for Tropicana, which featured a large glass of orange juice, was "ugly" and looked like a generic store brand, PepsiCo is bringing back the brand's old orange-with-a-straw logo.

The switchback is an embarrassment both to PepsiCo and to the design firm Arnell in New York, which was responsible for the $35 million redesign and accompanying ad campaign. (Peter Arnell, the design firm's founder, is also responsible for Pepsi's new logo - and is being mocked in media circles for a memo that relates the new Pepsi logo to Da Vinci, feng shui and the earth's gravitational fields.)

Labels: marketing