When you work at a medium- or large-sized company, you have an inherent advantage over small companies/start-ups: somebody else got you there. The law of averages means that it’s pretty unlikely that you’re the person who started the company from scratch and built into the Goliath that it is today.
When you work at a large company, you’ve got a lot of security as, even if you don’t show up to work for a month, someone’s still going to sell something and the company won’t die, and the shareholders will get their dividends, etc. This is a Faustian pact: in return for security, you’ve got to promise not to rock the boat and take the whole thing down (some bankers right now are learning about this). In practical terms, this means that most large companies are risk averse and bureaucratic.
But every now and then someone takes a risk. It can succeed spectacularly, or – as Tropicana is now learning – fail miserably. Tropicana recently decided to change their packaging. It used to feature a beautiful orange on the cover. An orange that looked so ripe and juicy that you had to buy the package because it was making your mouth water.
Now, they’ve replaced it with anonymous packaging with colours so muted that you can’t tell which package is which. For an 8-step takedown of this packaging failure, check out the Astuteo blog; this event is going to be an MBA case study in what not to do one day, and this blog entry will save you your admissions fee. There’s more coverage at The Times.
So how bad is it? Well, I went to my local Gristedes and snapped a photo of the juice section (I have to use that cameraphone for something). Guess how many different types of Tropicana there are?
There are at least 7. And that’s why they’re switching back to their original packaging.