I’m what some marketer somewhere must refer to as a dinosaur shopper.

In the supermarket, I tend to buy the same brands I’ve always bought. I have a soft spot in my heart for items that no one else seems to pay attention to any more. Check my shopping cart any week to find out if they’re still making Social Tea cookies, Lorna Doones and Chicken in a Biskit crackers. The tuna and mayonnaise brands in my tuna salads are a family tradition, because anything else would be … just wrong. And I will go to my grave having only eaten one brand of peanut butter (yes, after checking the salmonella recall lists from the FDA.)

So I am totally sympathetic to the irate customers who lambasted PepsiCo’s Tropicana Pure Premium for changing the iconic packaging of its orange juice. The new packaging came out in late January, and since I buy my OJ by the gallon jug, I’m just now working down to my next buy. But I was very prepared to hate the change, removing the orange with a straw that I remember from ‘70s commercials and replacing it with a plain old glass of juice.

What I’m not sure I’d have done is what some of those outraged OJ fans did: to take to e-mail and the Web to express their displeasure in e-mail, on blogs and in phone calls to the parent company. According to a story in today’s New York Times , it wasn’t the volume of complaints about the new cartons that struck parent PepsiCo. Rather it was the fact that the people who were registering their displeasure were apparently among the brand’s most committed customers.

They complained because they care.

The nature of their complaints is almost secondary. Most didn’t like the scrapping of the orange for a glass of juice—or actually half a glass. The brand name ran vertically on the new carton and in an unfamiliar typeface. As a result, customers complained that they thought the name of the product was now “100% Orange”.

And many of the calls and e-mails mentioned that the new Tropicana packaging—designed by the Arnell Group, which also redid the logo for Pepsi-Cola—looked from a distance like generic or store-brand juice. While store brands are getting a lot of attention from cash-strapped consumers these days, apparently those who are willing to pay more for a national brand don’t like having the experience compromised with the look and feel of a generic.

The hue and cry from its biggest fans was enough to get the brand to scrap its multi-million dollar repackaging effort and to revert to the old container designs. A larger print and outdoor ad campaign using portrait photos rather than beauty shots of the OJ will continue, but featuring the new—that is, the old- containers.

The Times piece quoted Tropicana North America president Neil Campbell as saying the company “underestimated” the loyalty consumers had for something as basic as package design.

“What we didn’t get was the passion this very loyal small group of consumers have,” he said in the press report. “That wasn’t something that came out in research.”

Maybe not. But if you’re tasked with the care and feeding of a legacy brand such as Tropicana, you’re part of the world’s largest permanent floating focus group. People were bound to have an opinion and then were sure to give vent to it on the Web. A few bounces around that digital echo chamber, and some core group of consumers would inevitably decide they were irate/chagrined/ticked off enough to make some noise at PepsiCo HQ. A quick Google search, and they were being heard in the front office.

Of course brands are entitled to freshen up their look, and in fact the older and more established the product, the more it might benefit from a little brand Botox. But marketers might be smart to actively solicit public input on the process to avoid the insular thinking that made PepsiCo and Arnell overlook what design elements linked Tropicana to its fans.

That’s what an older brand, the 150-year-old Eight O’Clock Coffee, is doing with a contest that lets consumers vote online for one of two package makeovers, earning themselves a shot at winning $5,000 in free groceries for a year or lesser gift-card prizes. If your favorite brand’s opting for a new look, a $500 Bed Bath and Beyond card for a new look in your own home could ease the pain.

As for calming those aroused Tropicana brand advocates, Campbell was quoted as saying that everyone who expressed an opinion on the package re-design would be contacted with news of the fallback to the old carton. That’s a good and necessary response to this perceptual misstep—one that acknowledges the value of the bond some shoppers have for some brands they trust.

Now if only the Hydrox people felt the same way about answering my many, many letters.