BRANDING MISTAKE!

It’s now a couple of weeks since the events that folks at Gap HQ will probably remember forever as ‘The Logo Incident’.  In case you missed it, here’s a brief synopsis.

Gap, the clothing retail giant, decided to shake up their stagnant sales by shaking off their reputation as a purveyor of bland wardrobe staples for supersized, middle-income Americans.  Their solution was to launch a new logo that would spearhead the metamorphosis of their brand into something ‘more contemporary and current’, which is retail-speak for saying that they were going after a younger market.  Unfortunately the key issues of branding were simply not followed.  

Gap’s online followers were less than impressed with the new logo and made their opinions known by flooding the company’s Facebook profile with negative feedback.  After a week of squirm-inducing commentary from Gap’s North American President (in which she pretended to be delighted that the logo was receiving so much attention whilst conveniently ignoring the fact that it was uniformly negative) the announcement came: the old logo was coming back.  Victory to the loud minority!

The cynic in me wonders...

...how many of the 1,800 people that left a comment on the Gap’s Facebook page were actually customers at their stores and not unemployed graphic design graduates with nothing better to do, but I do agree with their assessment.  There are several good reasons why the new logo was rubbish (most of which will be immediately apparent to anyone who looks at it) and it’s not surprising that it provoked such a negative reaction. 

What is surprising is that nobody at the largest clothing retailer in the USA had commissioned the market research that would have told them this and prevented them from launching it in the first place.  Given the overwhelmingly negative response that the new design provoked, I don’t think it would have taken too many focus groups before the Gap marketing chaps were forced conclude that it was a stinker.  However, the fact that they took it straight to launch has furnished us with a social media first.

Over the past few years, much has been written about the way in which emerging technologies are creating shifts in the balance of power between customers and corporations.  Social media websites have given consumers a public forum where they can discuss their experiences of large companies and voice any grievances or tales of maltreatment to what is potentially a very large and influential audience.  Instances of businesses using social media to identify and pacify a disgruntled customer have become relatively commonplace.  What had never happened prior to the Gap incident was an example of a relatively small group of social media agitators causing a direct policy u-turn at a major commercial organisation.   

Did the management of Gap take the right course of action by caving in to their online opposition?  Most commentators seem to think not, and have pointed out that social media could have been employed to trial alternative logo designs prior to an official launch, thus saving the company a lot of embarrassment.  Still, the fact remains that we have witnessed a watershed moment in the evolution of consumer empowerment through social media.  We were always told that something like this could happen, and now it has.  My guess is that it won’t be the last time.

Find this interesting?  Please let me know by commenting - thanks.