Shere Marketing Blog

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...

WHAT IS A BRAND?

Ask what a brand is and you will get as many different answers as the number of people you ask.

The original definition of course is:
A mark made by burning with a hot iron (branding iron) to designate ownership (e.g. of cattle).
Over time, brands became associated with the quality of the cattle and the value of the cattle reflected this.

Life has moved on.

The Dictionary of Business and Management defines a brand as:
"A name, sign or symbol used to identify items or services of the seller(s) and to differentiate them from goods of competitors."
But this is incomplete. It does not explain how a strong brand can become more valuable than an otherwise equivalent product or service.

Walter Landor, a leading light in the marketing world says...