Case Study: Tropicana Orange Juice

Tropicana Orange Juice, part of the PepsiCo brand family, learned the hard way, in January 2009, that not engaging the social customer could be very costly. The brand launched a full-scale package redesign, replacing their decades-old "straw in an orange" packaging with a minimalist, sans-serif design. Customer complaints ensued to the point where Tropicana eventually reverted to the original packaging the next month, in February 2009.

The New York Times called the incident Pepsi's "New Coke," referring to Coke's ill-fated 1985 product launch.

Neil Campbell, the president at Tropicana North America, part of Pepsi's Americas Beverages division, stated that the brand reverted to the old packaging not because of the number of consumer complaints about the change. Rather, Campbell said, Tropicana made the change because the criticism came from "[Tropicana's] most loyal customers."

I think he was talking about the social customer, don't you?

THE SOCIAL CRM PROCESS

The diagram of the Social CRM process below, developed by my friend Jacob Morgan from Chess Media Group, shows what a company like Tropicana should have done in its repackaging efforts. (The diagram is one of many in this book, all of which will also be kept on the book's social workspace, The Social Customer.)

Since the brand was asking a question, they should have begun by amassing a community on the social Web. That actually takes a little time, but a huge brand like Tropicana (whose products have been part of PepsiCo since 1998) could amass a big ol' community within 30 days, if they put five or six people behind the effort.

The next thing they'd need to do is engage, cross-channel (social Web, mobile, message boards, everything) and cross-language. The key to allocating effort here is spending the team's time where the customers are. For example, if Tropicana determined that 50 percent of their North American customers were in Canada, they should spend 50 percent of the "engagement hours" on the project speaking with those customers.

Following Chess Media Group's Social CRM Process, (see Figure 3.1) the next thing they'd want to do is aggregate that data with their nondigital data (phone calls, e-mails, feedback forms, etc.). Why bother with this? Well, when my Bubby Burnis (my grandmother) goes grocery shopping at the Wegman's in Fayetteville, New York, she's not going to be comfortable text-messaging her packaging choice back to Tropicana. But she might be okay with filling out a voting form in exchange for a two-dollars-off coupon. Tropicana could then have each of those point-of-purchase displays picked up by a home-sourced contractor in each local market. One hundred grocery stores times 500 ballots per store times six hours counting time equals $6,000 to get a statistically significant sample of what each nonsocial customer, nationwide, thinks of the new Tropicana packaging.

Ed. note: This is part of a series of excerpts from The Social Customer, the new guide to social customer acquisition, monetization, and retention by Adam Metz. For the first entry, go here.