With the juice drinking tradition changing and brand loyalty being challenged, Minute Maid set out to revitalize its brand identity. Its fruit-filled new packaging design not only increased orange juice sales for Minute Maid, it turned all-natural juices into the health drink of the '90s.

Even though The Minute Maid Company had long been a leader in the orange juice category, by the mid '90s, the category itself had gone flat. Juice alternative products, from fruit teas to flavored waters, had eroded the overall juice category. Young consumers looked upon Minute Maid as "their mother's orange juice" - wholesome but not where they were at. Even mothers didn't serve orange juice as often, as more worked outside the home and the sit-down family breakfast became a thing of the past.

Compounding Minute Maid's concern was the fact that its signature black carton, had been "knocked off" by so many competitors that it was no longer distinctive. Also, as non-juice products grew in popularity, juice makers staged ever-more aggressive campaigns to hang onto market share.

Squeezed from both ends by lifestyle changes and competitive pressures, Minute Maid set out to revitalize its brand image. At stake was its short-term profitability and the long-term strength of the franchise.

But revitalizing the Minute Maid brand was no small undertaking. Ultimately, the makeover would encompass 160 SKUs (shop keeping units) and packaging that ranged from paperboard cartons and shelf-stable plastic containers to aluminum cans, frozen juice canisters and 16-ounce glass bottles.

For the task, Minute Maid, a division of Coca-Cola Company, turned to Duffy Design, which had previously worked on the Diet Coke brand. Duffy account director Ed Mathie recalls the first meeting with Minute Maid. "They came in saying that the brand had a lot of equity, but they weren't getting the most out of it. They also recognized that a good solution would probably lead to redoing the entire brand."

Duffy's first move was to identify which elements in the existing brand were meaningful to consumers and worth preserving. "When you take on a brand that has a significant following, the last thing you should do is tear it apart and start over," explains Joe Duffy. "We work with the account planning group that we share with our advertising affiliate, Fallon McElligott, to analyze the equity in a brand. We begin by deconstructing the brand's iconography to gain a base to start from. It gives us parameters and allows us to learn how to continue the brand relationship with its core audience."

Consumer focus groups for Minute Maid provided interesting preliminary feedback. As expected, participants associated the color black with Minute Maid, with some even reporting that they automatically picked up "the black carton" when shopping without reading the label. But people also admitted that they found the brand identity "boring and dormant" and felt it didn't speak to the quality of the product or how the product might be better for you.

Still, they viewed the brand their mother used to serve them with nostalgic affection. People claimed to "love" Minute Maid, even if they weren't buying it. This high regard extended beyond the drink itself. "Consumers granted Minute Maid not only juice equity, but fruit equity," Mathie says, emphasizing. "It's one thing to be an orange juice, another to be an orange. The emotional connection to fruit is very strong, stronger than to juice." These findings confirmed Minute Maid's goal of making the fruit the hero in the packaging to show that the product tasted like the fresh, ripe fruit.

Surveying competitive brands, Duffy designers saw more ways for Minute Maid to establish brand distinction. "We noticed that no one was using photography effectively," Mathie says. "Most of the category was driven by illustration. At first, we thought it was because you couldn't get good print resolution on paperboard but, in fact, that isn't the case. Paperboard quality and print technology had caught up and the marketers hadn't leveraged that."

The designers began to see that photography might offer Minute Maid other advantages as well, says Neil Powell, design director for Duffy/New York, who headed the project. "Aside from feeling more real and natural, it's harder for competitors to knock off, if you do it in a distinctive way."

That distinctive way, the designers concluded, was through a colorful and lavish photomontage of the fruit from which the juice is made, with brand information and a newly designed logotype contained in a black mortise. The production difficulty and cost of creating such graphics would give Minute Maid competitive distance from would-be copycats while maintaining the look and feel of the original packaging.

In arriving at the final brand image, the designers used an iterative approach, creating different concept directions, presenting them to the client and then soliciting feedback from consumer focus groups. "At the end of the day, the relationship with the consumer is what we were trying to reestablish," says Mathie. "We did three rounds of focus groups. We took out our initial solutions, got feedback, did modifications and took it out twice more."

Initially, the designers focused only on designing the half-gallon carton, which represents the bulk of brand sales, and did some work on the 16 oz. bottle, which uses a different label size. "We tried to pick the extremes. The half-gallon carton being the biggest and the 16 oz. comparable to the smallest," Powell explains. "If we could solve those things, we felt we could hit anything that fell in between."

Given the dramatic differences in container sizes and shapes, the designers solved the problem by building a system of modular elements that could accommodate a wide range of applications. "This way we could retain the look and feel of the brand, without having it look pieced together," Powell explains.

But one ongoing issue was the amount of black that had to be used. Too much and it would look like the old identity, too little and the equity would be lost. "In focus groups, consumers loved the fruit montage in the background and pushed to see as much of that as possible," Mathie reveals. "At the same time, the more black, the more direct the link to the Minute Maid heritage and where the brand had been. It was a continuous 'real estate' struggle between the black mortise and the fruit montage."

Another consideration was the physical setting in which various containers would be viewed. First, there was the overall environment of the supermarket itself - which carries an average of 30,000 different items per store, according to the Food Marketing Institute. "Compared to a clothing store," says Duffy, "a supermarket is just one brand after another shouting for attention. It's a cluttered, chaotic environment. First and foremost, your brand is striving for attention among everything that comes into the consumer's view; not just within a category, but everything going on in the aisle."

Then, of course, there is a lot going on in every aisle and display case. Powell explains: "In many supermarkets, half gallon cartons are displayed in 'coffin-style' coolers that shoppers look down upon, so the primary identity needs to be visible from the top. Shelf-stable products, heated and vacuum sealed in plastic containers, are in aisles, which tend to have dimmer lighting than display cases. The products may be pushed back on the shelf, making them harder for customers to see. This means that the color palette must be very bright to stand out."

Powell continues, "Frozen juice canisters are often laid sideways in deep freezers and have limited 'real estate' because they are so small. Information on the can also has to be large enough to read, which limits the photography. What's good about the Minute Maid mortise design is we can lift it from the front and shrink it down and use it in different applications."

This was particularly important since Minute Maid wasn't just interested in developing a graphic system for its various orange juice containers. It also wanted to extend the branding program to its lemonades, fruit punches and other juices.

The designers applied the same photomontage concept, substituting lemons for the lemonade and mixed fruits for the punches. "Before the project, orange juice was the flagship and lemonade and fruit punches were not as visible," Mathie says. "While the new treatment elevated orange juice in the consumer's eyes, it brought punch and lemonade up much further because the packaging looks on a par with orange juice."

Another market segment that Minute Maid wanted to capture was young health-conscious consumers, the main purchasers of single-serve juice sold in bottles and cans. Prime outlets were convenience and gas station stores and vending machines.

Printing a detailed photographic image on an aluminum can, however, was a challenge. "Dot gain (ink spread) for aluminum can printing is significant," says Powell. "It's probably one of the crudest forms of printing out there because you are printing at such a high revolution per minute. We had to push the technical limits of our suppliers to match the same look and feel of the rest of the packaging." Needing white and black for the mortise, the designers had to use three colors to create the illusion of four-color printing in the photomontage. "It all came down to manipulation," Powell says.

But the designers were willing to sacrifice some loss of production value on the can side to gain it on other containers. "We didn't want aluminum cans to drive the look and feel of the design," says Powell. "If you design for the lowest common denominator, you're going to get the lowest common denominator."

Nevertheless, placing an eye-catching photomontage on single-serve containers did pay off. Minute Maid experienced improved results in all products during the first quarter after the new brand identity was introduced. Overall volume sales of single-serve bottles increased by more than 24%, and petroleum store sales, which accounts for nearly half of Minute Maid's total single-serve volume, increased by over 34%.

More important, the new brand graphics helped Minute Maid to achieve its objective of becoming more consumer driven than trade driven. "It's a matter of push versus pull," says Mathie. "With trade-driven products, you have to spend a portion of your budget on paying the trade to put the product on the shelf, feature it, give it a larger shelf 'footprint' than your volume would offer you. Another way to achieve these goals is to become a consumer-driven brand. We wanted to establish a brand preference so that consumers would demand the product and force the trade to give it prominence."

Duffy adds, "With a category like orange juice, consumer choice often comes down to brand personality, creating an identity that strikes an emotional chord with the target audience."

For Duffy, product packaging is "where the rubber meets the road." The food category is ripe with opportunity, he claims. "The people who produce the vast majority of food brands tend to give packaging the back of their hand. They pay attention to other things and don't realize that the packaging is an expression of the brand personality. The packaging is the brand in the consumer's hands. No matter how good the advertising or the actual product, if you can't get the product into the consumers' hands and convince them at that physical point of contact, they aren't going to try it. Winning in the marketplace is the end game when it comes to branding. If it doesn't ring the cash register, it's not successful."