Please hold the pickles though.
Susbtitutions for my products are not equal to the substitutions on my burger!
This month, our plug is Heat Up St. Louis! If you would like to donate, please visit their site at https://heatupstlouis.org/
SOURCES
Uncovering the Makers of the Iconic Girl Scout Cookies
https://www.thedailymeal.com/eat/girl-scout-cookie-taste-comparison-abc-little-brownie-bakers/
https://www.newsobserver.com/living/food-drink/article272510488.html
10 Iconic Food Brands That Changed Their Recipe and People Lost Their Minds
Picture sources:
https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/07/08/assassins-creed-black-flag-resynced-returns/
https://movies.disney.com/moana-2026
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes: https://www.themarketinggateway.com
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
Today’s news brings with it reviews of two remakes being released this summer. One of these is the video game Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynched, a complete rebuild of a historical pirate-themed game about sailing around the Caribbean and taking down other ships. It came out 13 years ago.
The remake adds in a lot of new features and includes about 12,000 new lines of recorded dialogue, attempting to create a definitive edition of the original game for modern video game platforms. I haven’t played the new one yet, of course, but based on the reviews, it looks like those who have are split on whether these changes are to the benefit or the detriment of the game.
It’ll probably still sell millions of copies to people who love the series, but I also have a feeling it’ll be the last time this particular piece of media can be remade in a way that will get people excited.
The second remake is Disney’s live action version of Moana, which came out just 10 years ago and which also involves sailing around the ocean, just in the Pacific Ocean this time. The original animated movie was perfectly fine, but this live-action remake, which stars Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as Maui once more and a new actress named Catherine Laga’aia playing the role of Moana, looked like a turkey from the day it was announced. Or, rooster, I guess, if you’d rather compare it to Moana’s dimwitted pet.
Again, I haven’t seen the live action remake, but I have noticed that Disney seems to be really worried about this one because they’re doing a lot more ticket giveaway promotions than usual. In both my physical snail mail and my email, I’ve received half a dozen offers for free tickets and special giveaway items, and I’ve taken note because usually, Disney presumes that adults with kids are just going to show up for their films. Maybe they started to realize as they got close to release that Moana 2 was in theaters a year and a half ago and that there’s really not a lot of demand for a remake in 2026.
Or maybe Disney feared that critics would get the word out early that this film’s a dumb dud that misses any opportunity to distinguish itself as a musical or a side story, and that’s pretty much exactly what has happened.
Why would people want a straight live-action remake of a movie they probably bought on DVD or Blu-Ray when those were still a thing and which they can easily watch on Disney+ today? And who wants a version where the songs are worse, the live action computer generated effects don’t look as good as the original 3D animated ones, and Maui feels like an imposter who’s only half the size of his larger-than-life animated counterpart?
This made me think about how often, consumers get really annoyed when the products they love are replaced with substitutes that try to change things, and whether we’re talking about an entirely new product like New Coke, a packaging disaster like Tropicana or a song you love being swapped out for an inferior cover version or alternate track, there’s nothing quite as irritating to a consumer as seeing something they love actually get worse with time.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
So I recently bought a six pack of 20 oz bottles of my favorite soda, Diet Mountain Dew, and I was a little surprised to see the soda had black caps instead of white ones. The black caps have been used on a different product, Mountain Dew Zero Sugar, which doesn’t taste as good and which often sits on the shelves while people buy out the original Diet Mountain Dew instead.
Now, I can’t confirm this, but those bottles of Diet Dew taste absolutely different from what I’m used to, and I’m pretty sure they’re either mislabeled or the bottler flat out decided to intentionally try to pass Mountain Dew Zero Sugar off as Diet Dew to get some of their inventory out there before the artificial sweetener turns and makes the contents taste gross. Whatever the case, I’ve learned my lesson – don’t buy the black-cap bottles, because there’s something off about them. Stick to the ones with the white caps instead.
What I’m describing here is a pretty common reaction consumers have when the products they love change in some way. Maybe the packaging changes. Maybe the ingredients change. Maybe the box says, “new and improved!” when no, no, the product is not improved in any way. Or maybe some sort of subtle change behind the scenes, like how the product is made in a different way or by a different contract manufacturer, makes things just seem worse in some way.
I come across this all the time when I buy private label products from companies like Trader Joe’s, Aldi or Costco. Sometimes, a product I really like will change in some way. Costco tends to change up the strawberry jam they sell because they have different contract manufacturers making it for them. What used to come in a big jar now comes in two smaller jars packed together, but there was also a different big jar variety that wasn’t as good and which they’d have sometimes. I’ve seen similar things happen with everything ranging from Kirkland-branded clothing to the baked goods they offer or the fruits they carry. Something changes and, for better or for worse, that’s what’s available now.
My family also has a preference for a certain variety of Girl Scout Cookies, and I don’t mean the individual flavors. There are two companies who make these cookies under contract for the Girl Scouts organization. One Is ABC Bakers and the other is Little Brownie Bakers. They not only use different recipes but also offer different varieties. Both, of course, offer Thin Mints that are more or less the same, but ABC Bakers has cookies like Toast-Yays, Shortbread, Caramel deLites, Peanut Butter Patties, Lemonades and Caramel Chocolate Chip while Little Brownie Baker offers cookies like Samoas, Trefoils, Tagalongs, Do-si-Dos, Lemon-Ups and Toffee Tastic.
Some of these are similar to their counterparts at the other bakery, and some are very different. If you’re lucky enough to be able to be in an area where both bakeries have distribution through different councils, you can even try a taste test. Many people have a strong preference for one or the other. Little Brownie Bakers has more imaginative names but tends not to be as popular in taste tests where people are most used to the ABC Bakers cookies, since those have been around for 90 years versus just around 40 years for the Little Brownie cookies.
The problem arises when you have a preference for one sort of cookie but your local council is assigned to the other bakery. I’m not clear on how this is decided and if the two bakeries compete the way that popcorn companies do for Scouting America, but what I do know is that when my daughter was an active Girl Scout, people would sometimes decide not to buy cookies if they were from the “wrong” bakery. It’s a fascinating situation where the consumers seem to be aware that a substitute product has been introduced and they’re not interested in buying it. For them, the experience of the one they prefer is what drives their buying behavior.
The Coca-Cola Company of course famously learned this back in 1985 when it introduced New Coke. I was just a kid and I always preferred Cherry Coke anyhow, but I remember the uproar. Coca-Cola announced it was changing its formula and that New Coke would be the new and improved version of the beverage going forward.
They had taste tests with consumers to prove that people liked it better, and it also made sense to change the formula since the Coca-Cola brand needed something fresh and new to give it a leg up in the cola wars with Pepsi.
This included changing the name to “Coke,” which tells you a lot about the 1980s, because that was the same decade that a candy called “Ayds” had to leave the market for being too similar in name to the deadly epidemic.
But of course, as we all know today, people hated the new Coke and bought out supplies of the original formula, eventually forcing Coca-Cola to reintroduce the original formula as “Coca-Cola Classic” and eventually make it the dominant brand again. It’s a classic tale of product marketing gone wrong.
But what we often don’t talk about are the other attempts to monkey around with the Coca-Cola product line. For example, New Coke was reintroduced as Coke II in a 1990 test market in Spokane, Washington before being canned for good. More recent failures have included Coca-Cola Spiced, which was just… eww, as well as Coca-Cola Blak and the later Coke with Coffee, which both tried to combine Coca-Cola and coffee into a drink that sort of worked, but felt like a compromise. But at least those were attempts to diversify instead of replacing the original.
More problematic is when consumers are given a substitution they just don’t want, and this sorts of feels to consumers like what happens when you put an online pick-up order in with Walmart, Target or a grocery store and they elect to sub in items they’re out of. I don’t want my Diet Mountain Dew being substituted for anything that might seem similar, thank you very much, and I also don’t want a different variety of the product I ordered because I might have good reasons for getting the one I selected.
For example, I might be purchasing a particular product because it’s vegetarian while similar varieties are not, I might be getting some with a particular flavor that isn’t captured by its counterparts or I might be concerned about a particular ingredient or chemical or scent or texture that’s in some versions of a product but not others.
But sometimes, a change in ingredients, materials, components or features in a popular brand can also make even the preferred product undesirable. For example, when food manufacturers have been tasked with removing things like trans fats or artificial dyes from their foods to appease regulatory or consumer concerns, the results have often made consumers angry.
Kraft Mac & Cheese had a backlash from consumers when it removed artificial dyes, and Campbell’s Soup had a similar backlash when it removed artificial ingredients in its Chicken Noodle Soup.
Sometimes, those concerns are also raised when product companies cheap out on ingredients. For example, Cadbury Crème Eggs and Nutella both scaled back on the amount of chocolate in their products to receive derision from American consumers, and some people refuse to buy either unless they can get them from Europe where the standards are different. Likewise with Coca-Cola – people who prefer cane sugar in their soda buy Coca-Cola imported from Mexico, where high fructose corn syrup is not used in the product.
And then there’s packaging substitution, which can actually be a major problem. Tropicana found this out back in 2009 when they overhauled their juice cartons to change the entire look of the packaging, making it difficult for consumers used to a particular look and feel of the packaging to pick up on cues that they were buying the same product. The problem wasn’t that the product had changed, but rather, that people couldn’t recognize it anymore. The more expensive solution of gradually changing the product packaging to get consumers used to the new look and feel was probably the better way to go, because sales dropped precipitously as consumers, unsure if they were buying the same product they already wanted, didn’t buy the one in the new packaging.
Sometimes, brands will also invest in signage or even communication campaigns showing people the old packaging alongside the new and explaining that they’re the same. But they also should do some consumer research, because consumers are often concerned that packaging changes will mask changes to ingredients, quality, quantity or other important product attributes, even including taste and smell. They’re also often more right than wrong about that – new packaging can make many things, particularly beverages, taste different due to the container. And in other industries like consumer electronics, new packaging often means new models that may have reduced features or even design flaws as the manufacturers try to optimize the product’s costs to squeeze out more profits.
Now, granted, it’s very hard to offer the same products, services or brands over time without changes creeping in because, after all, we live in a world that’s constantly changing. But here’s the thing to think about if you’re a marketer. People love things that are new and different because they seek novelty, and they also like things that stay the same because they crave permanence.
And so marketers have a tightrope walk to navigate where they need to ensure they offer both.
This is why brand extensions offer a good solution for capitalizing on trends or new flavor profiles but also allow marketers to stay focused on the customers who already love what they have to offer.
People can typically process change in two ways – fast or slow. Fast is ripping off the band-aid and getting things to a different state quickly, but it’s painful and something people tend to avoid doing. Slow is waiting for that band-aid to fall off on its own, feeling like maybe it was finally time for it to go because the wound is healing and perhaps not even noticing that it’s gone. In a perfect world, slow change is far easier for people to process than big change, and it also helps them not to have the same emotional reaction that they do when they feel that band-aid being ripped off.
“Oww!” is such a more volatile reaction than, “oh, wow, that’s actually better now.”
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
Leave a Reply