Mind the Gap

By Sanya Weathers

So, if you’re into branding and feedback loops, the saga of the Gap Logo is at the intersection of fascinating and frightening for you. (If you haven’t been following the story, the short version is that the Gap almost ditched their venerable old workhorse of a logo for something with Helvetica font and a teeny blue box in the corner. Consumer feedback was immediate, harsh, and loud. The Gap people went back to the old logo in less than a week.)

There’s plenty of stuff to read out there when it comes to the branding aspect of this situation. For me, sitting here at Metaverse Mod Squad, I’m fascinated by the community aspects of what happened.

Gap rolled out their new logo with quite a bit of attention paid to the social media channels. They created a Twitter account just for the logo (no, really, #gaplogo wasn’t a fake account), and they were very active on Facebook. By doing it that way, they’ve just served as an object lesson on how social media is a double edged weapon.

Side 1: Social media gave customers several obvious routes to provide feedback, which had a certain focusing effect. What might have been generalized and scattered complaining five years ago is now a firehose of commentary. And what might have just been analyzed in marketing circles by brand wonks became fodder for anyone with eyes and internet access.

Just as some types of art make no sense unless you have the background, so too are the arcane arts of logo design not always meant for general discussion.

Change is rarely embraced by customers. People like the comfortable and the familiar. If you’re making a branding change, it’s probably because you don’t think your current branding matches the audience you have or the audience you want. When you make changes to something as fundamental to your brand as your logo, you’re effectively saying yes, I want to shake things up. Yes, I want to take a risk, because I think this risk will pay off by getting us attention from the market segments that will be worth more to us than what we already have. By rolling out the logo using social media, the people who liked the old logo had their voiced amplified – and the people not yet following the Gap, who might have been tempted by the new logo to shop at the Gap, will never be heard from.

Side 2: One of the primary complaints people had about the new logo was that it looked… cheap. Generic. One blogger said it made Old Navy look like a luxury brand, which was kind of funny. A lot of people on Twitter said they’d be embarrassed to carry that bag out of an upscale mall. That’s not funny at all, if you’re a Gap executive.

Without social media, there would have been no way to know that the new logo was actively going to alienate the existing customers. No one shopping at the mall would have stopped to fill out a comment card to explain why they didn’t go into the newly rebranded Gap.

Twitter in particular represents the demographic sweet spot that Gap was going for with their rebranding. That is to say, young, suburban, not wealthy. People that might less expensive classic clothing. Focus groups are unlikely to capture an accurate snapshot of a group that is so broad. It takes something as broad as Twitter to capture this group’s prevailing mood, and by rolling out the logo on Twitter, they got the feedback they needed from exactly the group they needed to hear from.

So, did the Gap make a good decision to roll out such a fundamental change on social media? Hard to call, but I’m inclined to think they saved themselves a world of pain. The response was so visceral that the product itself would have needed to fundamentally different in order to justify such a major change. That wasn’t the case.

The real takeaway is that they should have showed off the potential new logos on Twitter earlier in the process. Furthermore, the Gap should be saluted for understanding that if you ask people for feedback (or launch a redesign in a medium that encourages feedback, same thing), you need to be prepared to act on that feedback… whatever it costs you.