Who owns Gap's brand?

Gap, the American casualwear retail giant, has scrapped a new logo that was slated by customers and will return to using its long established blue square logo. It's further demonstration of how customers  are able to exert ever increasing levels of control of a companies brand image — especially in industries like Fashion which have very active online communities.

The clothing retailer released a redesigned logo on its website on October 4 and had planned to roll it out in marketing campaigns starting next month. More than a thousand people left comments on Gap’s Facebook page, with a majority of them disparaging.

“We’ve learned just how much energy there is around our brand, and after much thought, we’ve decided to go back to our iconic blue box logo,” Louise Callagy, a spokeswoman for San Francisco-based Gap, said.

The new logo set the Gap name against a white backdrop, with a blue square in the upper-right corner. The logo change was part of that evolution of the brand from “classic, American design, to modern, sexy, cool" Callagy said last week.

Marka Hansen, the Gap brand president in North America, said in an emailed statement. “We are clear that we did not go about this in the right way. We recognize that we missed the opportunity to engage with the online community … there may be a time to evolve our logo, but if and when that time comes, we’ll handle it in a different way."

In my opinion it was also a potent demonstration of how out of touch major corporate identity specialists are. I can almost hear Laird and Partners pitch " … we chose this design as it's more contemporary and current. It honors our heritage through the blue box while still taking it forward."

Epic fail.

It reminds me of Coke ham-fisted attempts to change the flavor of an American tradition. There was initial acceptance and the product did well it’s first weeks, sales up 8% compared to previous year. However public outrage grew, with groups protesting New Coke (especially strong in the south). By June ’85 there was enough public pressure and complaints from bottling suppliers that Coke execs were under pressure. In July ’85 Coke brought Classic Coke back to the market.


It’s a great story of the risks of innovation. Coke did many things right – their greatest mistake was underestimating their customers lack of interest in innovation: they were surprisingly happy with how things were.

Coke didn't own their brand their customers did.