Evidently Mark Twain was wrong when he said, "Everyone complains about the weather, but no one does anything about it."
Recently Tropicana did something about the weather - the wrong thing. They announced they were reducing the size of the 64 oz. orange juice carton to 59 oz., in response to freezing weather's impact on the Florida orange crop. But they're still going to charge the same price. "As a result of those freeze-related costs and supply limitations, Tropicana, the biggest buyer of Florida fruit and juice, is announcing some pricing and packaging moves that we hope will minimize the impact to the consumer," the company said.
Orange you glad Tropicana cares?
How nice of them to keep our interests in mind. But will the new cartons announce "Big New 59 Oz. Size - Now At 64 Oz. Price!!" in a bright orange promotional burst? Will a new ad campaign tell how Tropicana cares about its customers, how a smaller quantity is a better value for them than a higher price? I don't think so.
I'm not pretending to be the Ralph Nader of breakfast values here. Instead, I'm looking at this from the marketer's point of view, trying to get across the importance of the customer-centricity that more and more marketers are adopting as an operating philosophy.
Openness and integrity are part of it. Accenture's Customer Centric Principles states that high performance organizations will "focus going forward on fostering trust-based relationships to the same degree they have focused, historically, on managing customer transactions efficiently."
Hershey Bar history
But Tropicana is still focusing on "managing customer transactions efficiently" - for their own sake, not for customers. Saying you're doing what's best for customer and then doing what's best for your business (and not telling anyone about it) has a long history in the consumer packaged goods business. The best known example is the incredible shrinking Hershey chocolate bar, which maintained the same price for years while it got smaller and smaller. (A famous paleontologist once wondered if this was an example of evolution in reverse, and that the Hershey Bar might someday disappear entirely.) You can find many more examples from Ziploc, Softsoap, Peter Pan and others at The Consumerist. Just enter "Grocery Shrink Ray" in their search box.
Today on Wall Street
Maybe there should be a new kind of economic indicator. Along with housing starts, retail sales, the consumer price index and the unemployment we could hear monthly reports on the Hershey Bar Index. On a brand-by-brand basis, it would measure how much less you're getting for your constant-value dollar. So consumers planning their own economies could learn which companies were truly customer-centric.