Hooolaaaa friends!
I’m pretty sure most, if not all, of you have heard of the world famous jeans company The Gap. They are well known for their jeans, their children’s clothing, and most of all their world famous white-lettering-on-navy-blue-background logo. The simple yet effective logo has been a trademark of The Gap for as long as many can remember, and it is hands down associated to the brand; so why would the marketing team at the The Gap have any incentive to change it? Recently, The Gap announced that they would be changing their logo to a new “more contemporary, modern expression.”, and they released images of it over the internet for consumers to see. After just a few days of the logo being viral, it wasn’t received very well to say the least. Gap consumers immediately flooded the internet with their displeasure, calling the new logo horrid, disgusting, and boring, and only 1 week after introducing the new logo, The Gap announced they would revert back to the original.
What intrigued me was not only the fact that they pulled the logo after only one measly week… but the fact that The Gap never once defended their new logo, or tried to get the public on their side with it. They simply introduced the logo, and withdrew it… Seems a little fishy to me. It doesn’t seem to make sense that The Gap would go through all that work and spend all that money designing a new logo, just to simply pull it after receiving some poor feedback. Apparently quite a few people agree with me and believe that it was all a marketing ploy. The Gap, being not the most new and upcoming company, hasn’t really been talked about in media or in the public in general for a while now, and after this apparent “logo flop” they were all anyone was talking about for a week, had articles published about them in the paper, and were being tweeted about everywhere; people started talking about The Gap again. To top it off, The Gap even wrote letters to the public basically saying that they respect the public opinion tremendously, and they changed the logo back to please the public. This was another intelligent marketing strategy for The Gap to use, because now they have risen in the eyes of the consumer. They are now more known as a brand that listens to consumers and does whatever they ask for… a very good thing for any brand.
So yeah, maybe they were actually planning on using the new logo, and maybe The Gap is just a brand that listens to their customers 100%, but honestly… I think there’s a little more to it than that.