As an avid package design lover, I was dismayed to see that Tropicana has recently redesigned its iconic “orange with a straw in it” package. In its place, an extremely generic package showing a glass of oj. Not only is the design not appealing, but it makes it difficult to distinguish the different varieties of juice.

In an interesting show of the power of social media, Tropicana has been inundated with complaints from people using Facebook and Twitter to register their displeasure. Hearing the collective gasp of the people, Tropicana has decided to scrap the new packages and reinstate its old packaging. This shows that social media is slowly finding its voice as an instant focus group and barometer of how people feel about brands.

• Tropicana Discovers Some Buyers Are Passionate About Packaging, The New York Times 2/22/09
• In Blow To Arnell, Tropicana Drops Package Redesign, BNET 2/23/09

Oddly enough, the firm responsible for the redesign flop was mega-agency Arnell, who also headed up the multi-million dollar Pepsi redesign. Design is subjective of course, but I haven’t heard from many people that like the new Pepsi logo and package design either. It’s equally generic looking and takes an existing product that has enormous brand recognition and unnecessarily strips it of any coolness just for the sake of it. While we’re on Arnell, I just took a gander at their Web site, and it was “under construction.”

Are they for real? Can’t they just leave their existing Web site up until the new one is complete? Was it that bad? We all know that these things take longer than anticipated, so what’s the reasoning here? An agency that has clients such as McDonald’s, Dodge, Jeep, Guggenheim, and Fendi shouldn’t be “under construction…”