Unless you’ve spent the last week under a rock (or in an Old Navy or Banana Republic), you’ve probably heard the backlash over Gap changing their logo to a “new” logo.
It was announced.
Then it was denounced. A lot.
And now it’s a footnote in the history of “how not to handle your brand’s identity.”
But why has there been so much chatter over a seemingly simple update to a logo? Instead of making up answers myself, I polled my design-expert colleagues at TMG. Here’s what they said:
Some killed it:
“Three words: Change is hard. But mostly, it’s because the logo’s new font swiped American Apparel’s and has no link to the Gap brand’s history or personality. They threw away the baby with the bathwater. The square in the new one feels like an afterthought and is not organically tied into the design of the name. It says nothing about where the brand is going, except it’s trying to be younger and hipper, glomming onto American Apparel’s sexed-up, youth-culture approach to street wear. It’s all big disastrous case of me-tooism.”
“The Gap logo, much like Coke and Apple, is iconic. The Gen Xers and, to some extent, Gen Ys, identify with the brand in much the same way they identify with their college mascot or school logo. As an updated maxim with apologies to Rene Descarte: We consume, therefore we are. And as part of that consumption, logos and brands help identify a generation, a population segment and, yes, a person. It might seem absurd to some that a logo change would create an uproar, but when personal identity gets into the mix, don’t underestimate the power of brand. In an aspiration-driven society, some of us identify with brand more than our own families. That’s pretty powerful.”
“When you have a brand as powerful as the Gap (I know, I just wrote those words, painful), people feel they “own” it as much as they own BMW or, again, “Penn State Nittany Lions.” We have flesh-and-blood family in America, and we have consumer family. Obviously, Gap falls into the latter category. And just as people want to have a say in what happens in their own family, so, too, do they feel ownership of their corporate family. Crowd sourcing would have helped here, but Gap did things the old-fashioned “Mad Men” way: unilaterally, which won’t win you friends in consumer-driven circles. (Newsflash: We’re nowhere close to a post-consumer society.)”
“Gap apparently wanted to change its logo to convey a hip, fresh, more youthful approach to its apparel without, um, actually creating hip, fresh, more youthful apparel. Consumers are smart. If they don’t see change (read: “new” Coke), they understand the Trojan horse for what it is. Gap first needs to create apparel for a new generation and then let its brand evolve organically—if it evolves at all. And that, again, will be up to the consumers who “own” the brand.”
“In short: Everyone loves a classic. The Gap is known for its timeless, effortless style – the classic pieces, such as blue jeans, white button-up shirts, v-neck t-shirts in a range of colors. The new logo tried to reinvent the Gapinto something that it’s not. The Gap will never be cutting-edge, trendy or crazy because that’s never been its clientele. When you do something that is that obviously fake, it’ll anger people. The blue square that they minimized and the new font tried to recreate a logo that already was instantly recognizable, in essence trying to “do away” with the old GAP and get in with the new.”
“Complete lack of concept, boring choice of type face and no individuality. A clothing company that has lost direction.”
“My feeling is the Gap is the Gap. And unless they were going to change the brand itself, the stores, the values, whom they want to attract (big question) and the type of clothes, it’s as bad as changing Nike without a good reason.”
“I smell Classic Coke”
“The old logo looks like a label you’d see in clothing. The new label looks like a chemical chart (the periodic table?) or pharmaceutical name. Old, somewhat stylish. New, cold and uninteresting.”
“Being a huge shopper, I think the logos that get results are more like JCrew, Hollister, Anthropology, Abercrombie, etc. These logos are much warmer and more trendy; the new Gap logo to me seemed sterile.”
“The new logo takes away that nostalgic feeling of belonging to certain group. If you buy the new logo you are no longer a Gapper.”
Some were confused:
“I don’t get the new Gap logo. It is more modern than the old one? What does that blue box mean? Perhaps it represents the generation gap? This from a lifelong, avid Gap shopper.”
But some came to the defense:
“Interestingly enough, I do like it. It is not far off what the logo looked liked when the company first opened in the ‘70s or late ‘60s, but most people won’t remember. The classic one is not so classic.”
“I think they jumped the gun in killing the new logo. They based their decision on the negative feedback they got from their marketing and agency peers and never even gave consumers a chance to react.”
“Although the new logo looked silly to the marketing community, it might have resonated with Gap’s original customers who would possibly remember it from the 1970s. Unfortunately the general population of consumers, the people whose opinions really matter, will never see the new logo.”
Why do you think the Gap’s new logo got slapped down by the marketing community?
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
All good comments, mostly, anyway, but I’d add that the newly killed Gap logo just looks generic. It looks like something that could have been done on a computer. This isn’t brand art, this is clip art.
The agency who created this should probably just be shut down by the BBB. They would have been better off handing this logo assignment to a kindergartner and telling them to write G-A-P in crayon (blue, of course).
This isn’t a logo; this is being high and drunk at 3am, then opening up MS Word.
Honestly, the new logo is growing on me. Additionally, Gap does not plaster their logo all over their garments, rendering this discussion somewhat pointless.
I hesitate to ask but who shops at the GAP anymore?
I can understand the GAP people being tired of their logo; we all get tired of things we work with every day for years. But the design/marketing community is tired of Helvetica; though it’s doubtful consumers are; that’s a big part of the backlash. “What, ANOTHER Helvetica logo?!?”
The logo change was huge. Simply changing the type in the box to a sans serif would have given them a younger look without drastically changing the geometry of the logo; then you could drive by one of their stores and not be confused by the change, as I’m sure I would have been. On the other hand, if they had just gone through with it, we all would have gotten used to it in a year or two anyway.
Good points about the new logo being too much like American Apparel; maybe I’m showing my years, but are their clothes competitive with each other? I would think their audience would be different. Are yuppies dying out? Have we entered another Baroque period of clothing design, and will GAP die before classical clothing comes back? Or should they just wait it out?
{ 2 trackbacks }