No matter if you’re updating a corporate voice for a world-wide company, a mid-size or small company, a city, team, politician or your own individual corporate voice, check it and double check it will positively communicate what you want to your target audience.
I tweeted about this yesterday (check it out on my Twitter link) but felt it deserved more attention. The examples talked about in the article were Gatorade and Tropicana Orange Juice. Both of these companies were introducing new products which, of course, is what companies do periodically to stay competitive. How they handled their corporate voice during both of these launches is very different.
Gatorade is introducing new drinks with new packaging using the G and naming their drinks: Prime 01, Perform 02 and Recover 03, each of which is designed for drinking before, during or after an athletic event. Consumers now not only have to decide what flavor they want, but what they want as an outcome from drinking the Gatorade product. Before they introduced this new line, I had trouble finding the Gatorade I wanted to purchase and spent more time in the aisle searching the products. I guess I’ll have to spend even longer now as I’m already confused as to what product I might purchase. I’m not sure the powers-at-be thought about public perception and how consumers might react to this confusion. What is even more interesting is Gatorade had to produce an ad to explain these products and try and sort out the confusion.
Tropicana had a somewhat similar situation when they launched their new packaging for their Tropicana Orange Juice. Consumers became so confused trying to find their favorite OJ, they bombarded Tropicana with emails and phone calls and eventually Tropicana changed the packaging back to the more familiar words and logos.
It will be interesting to see if Gatorade does the same thing. Corporate Voice always influences public perception, so think long and hard the next time you’re launching a product or just updating your corporate voice.