Browsing all the news about the Tropicana redesign and subsequent reestablishment of the old design, I wondered what did the online RFP look like? Did anyone even think of digital until Arnell’s designs were set in stone? What would their goals be? Luckily, New Media Strategies (NMS) gave me a peek into a social media strategy for Tropicana.

Hmm…ok, ride the coat-tails of the election to increase brand awareness. What does orange juice have to do with politics? And why is a beverage giving me a data visualization of the Twitterverse? I appreciate it, but I’d probably turn to CNN or Twitter itself for more accurate election info. As for the data viz, it looks pretty enough but needs to be closely examined to actually pull any information out of it. I’m not exactly sure what I’m looking at.

So did they accomplish their strategy? NMS says that online placements and messages totaled over 4.6 million impressions. AnOrangeAmerica received thousands (1,000? or 10,000?) of visitors to the site with approximately 15% clicking through to watch a Tropicana commercial. That’s raising brand awareness with a pretty small group of twittering, politics-hungry folks who dig data visualization.

Also, upon closer investigation the "buzz" NMS says they created and documented with Delicious is actually a bunch of their own people talking about their own project. I appreciate the effort to try something new by both NMS and JESS3, but it just doesn’t seem very "on brand" to me. I can picture someone in a meeting saying "wouldn’t it be cool to use Twitter and data viz and the election for this project" but it doesn’t seem a logical extension of an orange juice brand.

Yes, passionate Tropicana fans exist. Facebook alone has 10 unofficial Tropicana groups. Perhaps Tropicana would have been better served talking to those folks? Maybe even getting some feedback on the new branding? They might’ve saved themselves the trouble of re- and subsequently un-rebranding.

And for the record, while Peter Arnell’s description of the branding made me LOL, I do like the little orange screw top. Nice touch.

Something to think about:

Maybe the problem is the fact that we call it "digital strategy" instead of just "strategy." It tends to make people think about the digital opportunities in terms of specific executions rather than thinking holistically about reaching out to real people in ways that make sense in both the real and digital world.