I don't want "new and improved". Stop it! Leave my tasty thing alone. The number of times I've changed brands, and never gone back, because "improved"...
And the worst, I buy frozen pizza. Unlike my fellow shoppers, I buy for the best crust flavour, and only meat.
Why?
Because if you want good frozen pizza, buy great crust, meat only, the put fresh veggies on it! Meat freezes well, not so much veggies.
Lately, one brand has added "croissant crust" and also "cheese in crust", and unless a supermarket is the size of all creation, it doesn't have room for one brand with 8 types, by 3 styles.
The result? The best crust, without extra calories(cheese), is now impossible to find.
I had to switch brands.
Just stop it ffs!
New coke was released, because they were being forced to change their formula. Some say they released new coke, knowing they'd have to re-release old coke, but that by that time the average person would not accurately notice the taste change.
A friend of mine, a coke fan, kept a case of old coke. He tried the newer-old coke, side by side...
It didn't taste the same.
Some say new coke was a wild success. Loads of media attention, and they dropped the formula change in without notice...
The New Coke story is quite interesting, but I don't buy in to most "explanations" of it. I think it's far more likely it's a case of "competitor X is more popular! We need to do something! Let's copy competitor X!" This is a classic business mistake, because customers are choosing you instead of X because it's not X, and if you merely copy X you lose your value.
It was so good that I refuse to buy regular Nutella anymore, even though the "extra cocoa" edition seems to be no longer sold.
We changed our recipe to increase our margins and the testers didn't even notice! You're gonna love it too.
They've been my favourite snack for years. I'm gutted.
Of course, if you are not price conscious then you can mostly avoid these issues by buying the most expensive of everything, but you're talking frozen pizza here...
For me, out of the brands I can try locally, its crust seems best.
See this comes down to simple maths though. If you can retain enough of the loyal customers and win some news ones with the "exciting change", the net difference is worth it.
This keeps happening so I guess the maths checks out.
The original comment that started this thread listed a bunch of plausible and probable causes of branding changes, and all of them are only rational from the point of view of an individual and orthogonal at best to the improvement of the business they are working for.
Many modern UI "designers" are certainly not worth of that name, in that they change things not according to systematic study and observation, but only due to their own hunches and personal preferences.
Usability studies have so many confounding variables that it's not even funny. It's not hard to pick studies to support anything. As if that wasn't enough, they're highly contextual and inevitably used in a completely different context.
None of the well known great designers of the past century relied on A/B studies to do what they did. Granted, they likely delivered a lot of duds too, but at least those designs could be identified as bad.
Designs with statistics behind them can never be bad because the numbers haven't changed, and the numbers was what motivated the change in the first place.
This is too much even. Of course it's better if the taste doesn't change. But there is a huge I've already bought this before in my buying patterns. Unless something becomes unserviceable I'll probably keep buying it.
EG, I buy battered fish in a blue box, the box disappeared from my main grocery store. When I went to my less visited store, it was gone there too. Literally, I just picked a random replacement brand.
Another thing which gets me, is marketers think everyone buys things weekly. And I once noticed a product I was hunting for with "New look!" on the box, but if was the last of the "New look!" boxes, the ones behind tem were missing the pronouncement.
I'm buying fish sticks here, and I do so once every 6 months, and throw a bunch of boxes in my deep freeze.
I'm not tied into what "exciting change" some yahoo thinks their product is going through, nothing is exciting about the food I buy, I just want fish sticks.
The box could remain the same for 100 years, and I'd buy the same thing, as long as the taste and quality inside didn't diminish.
UI designers ruined Gnome, ruined my fish sticks, ruination upon us all due to UI designers.