Branding Misstep Falls into the Gap

Every so often, purveyors of consistently quality products decide to alter their brand's face to the world. Recently, it has become commonplace for that change to set off an army of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog impersonators – leaving brand tenders and creative shops covered in, well, you know.  This month, it was the Gap, but just a year ago, Tropicana's package update and subsequent reversal almost destroyed the brand.  People freaked out when BMW radically changed the look of its 7 Series in 2002.  This type of brash response by a suspecting public is no longer an isolated incident - it's another one of the realities of the digital age.

The problem for Gap is that most of the feedback actually came from designer types, but that wasn't necessarily clear at first.  The Gap simply saw the reverberation around the web and overreacted.  They posted on Facebook that they were willing to take people's entries for new ideas, which set off the very industry insiders who were upset to begin with.  Nothing pisses off a creative like implying that some guy at home using MS Paint can do a better job than a strategy-focused team of art-school graduates.  Now Gap has yet to provide a means for aspiring designers to provide a new logo, and it really doesn't make sense for a brand like Gap to be open to suggestions.  They are, after all, a fashion brand.  People want fashion brands to tell them what to wear, not the other way around.  It's really a mess.       

Does the new Gap logo really suck that much?  Who knows, creative is and always will be subjective.  But people seem to hate change for the sake of change, which seems to be the case here.  It seems an odd time to go futuristic when Gap is plugging their classic 1969 jeans style.  On the other hand, Gap hasn't exactly been selling a lot of clothes at all lately, so it would make sense that they're trying to change it up.  But the new logo was only featured on their website.  The company didn't even have the chance to update their Facebook page and other media outlets, and they never made any official announcement.  Instead, a small minority of people saw the new logo, went straight bananas, and it became a news story. 

The curious thing about these types of stories is that, when the digital dust settles, most people don't actually care.  A post-apocalyptic survey by Ad Age revealed that the vast majority of those surveyed didn't even notice the change.  The story should really be about insiders commenting on what they've self-righteously identified as a flawed strategy.  Does a logo even affect what jeans you buy?  I've always found I judge jeans on whether they make me look like a fat piece of crap and go from there.  MTV's logo change a year ago didn't increase or decrease their viewership (they basically removed "music television" from the bottom).  Maybe it created some conversation, but does MTV really need a logo change to create discussion?  A better technique would be putting Speidi in a hamster wheel atop the Grand Canyon or injecting more than four minutes of actual dialogue into an episode of The Hills or City.  MySpace has a new logo too, but I bet you didn't know that, because you probably don't go to MySpace.  Ever.  Really, Gap should be proud that enough people cared about them to complain.  While Tropicana was the rare case where packaging changes actually damaged sales, this episode with the Gap could have been spun into a good thing.

  

With social media being what it is, companies need to realize that all these sorts of changes are going to generate negative reactions, because that's what the Internet does best.  The fact that Sun Chips abandoned the first 100% compostable bag because people were complaining it was too noisy is absurd.  It was a FULLY COMPOSTABLE BAG! Are you serious, America?

A day's worth of negativity on the web is like five seconds of real PR time, just like ten phone calls to Frito-Lay from some incredibly short-sighted consumers represents about 15 actual people.  BMW stayed put with their 7 Series design, and it's since been recognized as a revolutionary step forward for the brand.  Meanwhile, Gap has since announced that they're keeping their old logo and have thanked their 700,000 Facebook fans for all the "support."  You're welcome.  I guess.