Who knew that font type is so important? I personally do not identify brands or companies solely based on the type of font that they use (or maybe I just don’t realize that I do), until I came across several discussions on Gap’s new logo – and that’s when I was fascinated!
The Gap brand is extremely well-known all over the world as it has been dominating the retail industry ever since the 1900’s. Unfortunately, over the past decade their sales growth has been slow and many other clothing brands are surpassing them. Despite this, many people have been accustomed to Gap’s traditional logo; therefore, when they decided to completely rebrand themselves with a new logo about a week or so ago many consumers went frantic. The new logo had the last two letters written in lower case, it used the Helvectia font, and written in black with a white background and a little blue box on the side. The strongest response actually came from social media users where they demanded the return of the original logo because they felt that the new logo did not represent the brand that they loved and it even simply just looked like a Windows clipart.
As a result of such a negative responses, the company made a U-turn and went back to the old logo. The North American Gap Brand manager admitted that their new rebranding was a disaster and that they will learn from this experience. And voila, we have our favourite Gap logo back!
After reading all the articles and keeping up with the news, I was actually very surprised that such a well-established company would do something so mindless and even ridiculous. Then I thought again and maybe it was actually part of their marketing strategy to bring back its loyal consumers and capture the attention of those that don’t know them. This might have probably been a reminding for the consumers that even though there are loads of other brands out their available, Gap is still one of the best and that they can trust in their products because they can trust in their brand. If this was the case, the I have to admit that it was a great strategy due to the reactions and responses that they managed to receive.
Gap should just remember that their logo is their brand, their brand is their identity, their identity is attached with millions and millions of consumers; so one move on fooling with their brand could potentially cause them to lose everything.