Hot Commodity

Today I ate a yellow watermelon. When I closed my eyes, it tasted perfectly normal. When I opened them though, I couldn’t help but expect each bite to taste like pineapple or some other citrusy fruit.

Some changes companies make are advantageous because they are symbolic, more efficient, or an important marketing ploy.

Wal*Mart… oops I mean Walmart*… changed its logo to signify changes in the company’s policies and customer service and a revamping of the company and its reputation. I’m not saying that a simple logo change will help them accomplish all this, but I understand where they are coming from.

When Zephyrhills and Poland Springs changed the shape of their bottles it was not only more eco-friendly but also allowed them to showcase their new eco-friendly focuses. Plastic water bottles, in general, are the most anti-eco-friendly invention ever, but that’s a whole different story. Again, the change makes sense from their perspective.

When Head & Shoulders overhauled their shampoo bottles to emphasize their change from a functional consumer product to a “desirable beauty brand” the sleek new curved bottle shapes were important from a consumer awareness point of view.

When Heinz decided to sell green and purple ketchup, however, the change was unwarranted.

There was just something weird about putting green goo on my French fries (as opposed to red goo), and it seems like others felt the same way because the green and purple bottles were off the grocery store shelves as quickly as they had gotten on. This change was completely unnecessary- change for change’s sake it seems. The taste was the same, but red ketchup is a successful staple and there was no reason to tinker with that. Mass idea generation is great, but these ideas then have to be assessed from all angles before spending time and resources on them because unfortunately, all ideas are not created equal. For example, the idea to find a way to grow yellow pineapples watermelons should never have been supported.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Company Zeroes and Heroes, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.