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Even the most successful marketing companies in the world regularly get caught in the "adoption trap," where they are certain they know enough to sell their product without having to seek new information to question their assumptions.

I fell into this trap just a few months after my first job as a brand manager at Procter & Gamble. My first project was working on the young Citrus Hill Orange Juice brand. The brand struggled, a distant third in the race against Tropicana and Minute Maid. P&G was a leader in approximately 90% of the product categories in which the company operated. Citrus Hill's third place had made the brand a top management target. They wanted Citrus Hill to rise to the top of the orange juice brands – FAST.

The Winton Hill laboratory brand group and research team were desperate to do what we did best – product upgrades. New formulations from Citrus Hill were developed until the juice won blind taste tests against all competitors – notably Tropicana and Minute Maid. Excited about our results, we now believed the competition could be beaten. After all, we now had the best tasting orange juice in the world.

P&G invested more than $ 2 million in a new advertising campaign to let consumers know that Citrus Hill tastes better than any other orange juice. Management was confident and had high expectations. The new advertisement aired. Everyone was ready with tall glasses of juice in hand, waiting for the next market share / sales reports from Nielsen Research to toast our triumph.

The day came, the results were there and the mood suddenly darkened. Nothing happened to the sale. The consumers were not moved.

Management's quick response was that the advertisement didn't have to have delivered the message effectively. As is so often the case, the advertising agency was to blame. Ad testing became a self-fulfilling prophecy, and so the brand invested another million dollars in new ads to let consumers know that Citrus Hill tasted great. With a lot of excitement, the new ads were broadcast again.

One month later the same result. No consumer reaction. "How could that be?" The brand group asked further. "All of our consumer research has shown that taste is the most important factor for consumers when choosing their orange juice." That cycle of attempting to reposition Citrus Hill for taste preferences went on for several years before P&G finally admitted failure and pulled the brand off the market.

What consumers say and what they mean

Why did Citrus Hill fail? When you've reviewed all of the traditional research, Citrus Hill's positioning was exactly in line with what consumers of the brand group were saying: "Good taste" was most important. "Freshness", "good nutrition for the family" and "orange juice brightens the morning" were secondary benefits. All of these promises have been built into the positioning of Citrus Hill and expressed in the copywriting and packaging. The brand group had used every logical and methodical tool in the P&G research arsenal to understand why consumers should prefer Citrus Hill, but they were empty.

The brand group eventually realized that buying decisions don't always depend on the rational criteria consumers tell you in focus groups and other research. When it comes to competitive products, there is often little difference in terms of quality and product performance. This parity is especially true for categories where the product is a commodity – including orange juice or coffee.

In this case, while “good taste” was important, most consumers did not believe that their current orange juice tasted bad or should taste better. Consumers believed that “100% orange juice” was “100% orange juice” – so how could there be a taste difference between brands?

Citrus Hill's "better taste" positioning made no sense. Most consumers thought the brand they were currently buying tasted great. So consumers weren't lying – taste was most important to them. However, this was not the differentiator on which their purchase decision was based.

If one ignores the segment of shoppers who based their purchase decision only on a low price (not a profitable segment to be a gambler), “freshness” was the product benefit that consumers primarily made their purchase decisions on. Many consumers believed that fresh juice was better, healthier juice – and they didn't think that concentrate juices like Citrus Hill could taste as healthy or fresh.

The competitive "fresh" juice brands from Tropicana and Minute Maid knew they had a consumer advantage and they gambled it. In the packaging and advertising of the category leader Tropicana was an orange with a straw and the slogan "You simply cannot choose a better juice – for freshly picked freshness choose Tropicana Pure Premium." Game over. Citrus Hill did not have a "freshly picked" product offering, and Tropicana had the perfect product and advertisement – a straw in an orange – that matched consumers' desire for "fresh" orange juice. You can't get any fresher juice!

If our Citrus Hill brand group had challenged our assumptions more, we would have discovered the real drivers of consumer buying and realized that the promise of “great taste” would have been ineffective.

Challenge all assumptions to the point of certainty.

Contribution to Branding Strategy Insider By: Eric Schulz, Senior Brand Strategist at the Blake Project and Co-Director of Strategic Marketing and Brand Management at the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business. Excerpt from his book "The Smart Marketer & # 39; s Toolbox"

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