JTroll

The Lesson Gap Needs Isn’t Far Away.

Gap’s multi-year struggle to stay relevant has just hit two new massive snags, and their ramifications go well beyond what you might expect. When Monday’s Gap logo refresh hit their website, they quickly devolved into bad brand management: both in how it treated its design, and in how it managed the design’s public outcry. (Heck, there’s even a tool now to make your own Gap-ified logo.)

The irony is that they only have to look a few blocks away from their San Francisco office to see a better model for branding success.

The Problem Cuts Deep

For over a decade, the kindest thing you could say about Gap clothing was that no one really minded it. In the mid-nineties, seminal Gen-X author Douglas Coupland wrote in Microserfs that Gap clothing was the universal nerd uniform for fitting in: it allowed you to look “like from nowhere [and no time] in particular.” 

Put bluntly: If Kanye is hot pink, and John Varvatos is sleek black, Gap has been the comfortable shade of gray.

Unfortunately being the everyman-brand doesn’t always pay off. Gap revenues are flatlining across the board, or falling: Banana Republic is stagnant, Old Navy dropped 5 percent across their stores, and Gap itself dropped 2 percent. The whole portfolio was in a bit of a tizzy, even before the rest of the economy took a nosedive.

Twelve months before the start of the the 2007-2009 recession, the New York Times reported that Gap’s then-plunging sales were causing an internal ruckus. They needed a “broad review of the company’s strategy,” The Times said. It was time for a change: not only in the clothing itself, but in how the brands presented themselves to the public.

And so we enter the role of branding.

Simplicity is Selling

Moves toward cleaner branding are generally greeted with applause these days — thanks go to figures like Jonathan Ive for pushing cleanliness and simplicity into the public desire.

In the branding world, the movement has met with varying degrees of success. In 2008, for example, Pepsi famously refreshed their logo with the help of Arnell Group. The effort caused some consternation, but in the end, it stuck.

Both Coke and Pepsi have sported simplified packaging in recent years, with Pepsi using a new, cleaner logo as well.

In the same year though, Arnell Group also helped Pepsi redesign the Tropicana brand, both in logo and in a complete package design overhaul. 

The effort pushed simplicity to its extremes, and in the process lost sight of some of the key values of the brand: the iconic value of drinking juice straight from an orange was a powerful element, lost instead to a bland swath of orange. The redesign backtracked almost completely, with Peter Arnell left holding the bag explaining why they thought it was going to work:

AdAge’s report showing a quick talk with Peter Arnell on why the Tropicana rebranding was supposed to be successful.

Other brands have met with more success in modernizing their image, though. Nickelodeon, for example, is in the middle of a multi-year process to overhaul their wild orange-splash imagery with an arguably more cohesive branding package, across all of their properties: Nickelodeon, Nick at Nite, TeenNick, Nick Jr., and Nicktoons. New York-based Trollbäck + Company leads the effort admirably, providing a fun and flexible way to treat the portfolio.

Even internet giant AOL can be considered a success in its rebranding — in pushing from their stodgy dial-up past image to a modern content juggernaut, they managed to create a flexible and fresh multi-image identity that’s allowed them to use it across their ever-expanding set of content sites. It is possible to do this right. The proof is there to see.

Taking the Gap Tumble

For all appearances though, it seems Gap didn’t take the ramifications of rebranding seriously when they pushed their own modernization. On Monday they slapped the new logo on gap.com, and later announced intentions to push it across stores nationwide. The result looks slapdash, paying only lip service to the heritage the 1969 logo contained. Helvetica type over a blue gradient box are bordering on insulting, especially when one considers how Helvetica is the go-to Corporate typeface for the Microsofts of the world to stay “humanist” and relevant.

The backlash has been fierce. A quick look at Gap’s Facebook page shows that much.

That public outcry forced three-year CEO Marka Hansen to write a weak public message explaining that they were looking to “evolve” the Gap brand, so that their customers “take notice of Gap and see what it stands for today.” After five years of lagging sales, the impetus is clear — Gap needs to break from a more stodgy brand identity, into something that feels more current for its 20- and 30-something crowd. 

Maybe being “gray” isn’t working so well any more — at least in terms of perception.

The Lesson of Levi’s

But a mile or so down The Embarcadero in San Francisco sits the headquarters of a brand even older than Gap, who’s managed to press forward a modern and forward-looking image while keeping the classic nature of their brand. I’m speaking, of course, of Levi’s.

Contrary to the beliefs of some, brand is more than just a logo. Brand is an overall identity. It’s what the public sees as your company, through both its visual and its written communication. Years ago Levi’s was also struggling with timid sales growth, but all they needed to do was change how it marketed its message.

The Levi’s logo has remained basically unchanged since they began stitching that white-lettered red tab on their jeans in 1936. As a branding device, it’s been iconic: bold, modern, and singularly identifiable for almost 75 years. 

So how to appeal to a modern audience, despite a logo almost a century old? The message. Great agencies like Wieden + Kennedy have strung together a series of engaging, forward-looking messaging campaigns over recent years that have propelled the “cool” of Levi’s — like their “Guy Walks Across America” ad (since pulled from YouTube).

Gap, on the other hand, has a crisis of advertising identity. While they’ve famously done ad campaigns featuring famous faces like John Mayer and Jennifer Hudson, stagnant growth should show that this approach might not be working any longer. 

To further add to the fire, AdAge reported earlier this year that they’ve had a hard time finding a long-term bedfellow for an ad agency, instead deciding to switch partners with each passing season.

What’s the Lesson?

It’s The Message, Stupid. In all seriousness, people resonate with a brand’s visual identity through its logo far more than corporate heads sometimes expect. Laird + Partners — who designed the new Gap logo — is an advertising agency first, and not necessarily as experienced in generating national brand identities. Although Laird + Partners haven’t publicly discussed their methodology or the extent of their customer research, it’s clear that it wasn’t enough. When you’re dealing with the 84th most-valuable brand on earth, it’s worth listening to the public sometimes.

It’s time to regroup, perhaps even retreat (let’s call it “pulling a Tropicana”), and give the reigns to people who know the ramifications of what they’re doing.

As an aside, it may be worth noting that I couldn’t find a high-resolution version of the new Gap logo anywhere. As a result, I created the one you see in the main image above in about 2 minutes, using Helvetica LT Std at -20 tracking and a blue gradient box in Photoshop. Barring a slight foreshortening of the p’s decender, it’s almost pixel-perfect.