Branding & Visual Identity
A brand is not what you think it looks like. It is how customers find you.
The business case
The Redesign That Erased the Brand — Tropicana Pure Premium, PepsiCo · United States · 2009. Tropicana Pure Premium was a market leader with annual revenues in the region of seven hundred million dollars in North America. In January 2009 it launched a new carton design intended to modernise the brand.
Why it matters
A brand is not what you think it looks like. It is how customers find you. The design team optimised for how the carton looked in isolation. Customers use packaging as a recognition shortcut in a crowded aisle under time pressure. Those distinctive assets — a colour, a shape, a specific image — are functional infrastructure, not decoration. Removing them removed the ability to be found. For a new venture the lesson inverts usefully: your first job is not to look sophisticated. It is to become recognisable, and then to stay consistent long enough for recognition to accumulate.
What you will be able to do afterwards
- What a brand actually is, beyond the logo
- The brand identity stack: name, logo, colour, tone
- Building a digital presence from day one
32 screens, audio-narrated, with a quiz at the end.