The “Gap” in Gap’s Recent Brand + Identity Change

Interesting news on Yahoo! Finance today about retailer Gap’s recent brand-change fiasco.

Seems like a bunch of Gap fans got together online and publicly rejected the casualwear chain’s efforts to update or change their brand. The article recaps the saga with the following: “Gap will keep its decades-old white-on-navy blue logo after all. The move comes just one week after the company swapped it online for a new logo without saying a word. The new logo irritated fans, spurring them to complain about it online.”

It seems to me that in today’s world of open engagement with customers, follower or liker bases, it’s become almost impossible to remove or exclude “fans” from providing input for key marketing decisions and campaigns such as, case in point, an organization-wide brand change.

I remember back in the “old days” of marketing, pre-Twitter and pre-Facebook, sitting in a board room with a handful of executives during a company-wide brand change campaign. It was, back then, a closed-room decision that, for all intents and purposes, was really left for one person to decide the final outcome of the company’s brand: the CEO. Sure, the VP of Marketing was there … and so was the VP of Technology and the PR agency hired for the project.

Back then, there was *no* voting, no employee contests or employee-input collected. There was surely no crowdsourcing or online polls or open display for customers or company patrons to help determine the fate of the company’s brand. At the end of the day, it was the CEO who would ultimately decide — and who did decide — the version of the identity she wanted. After all, she WAS the one signing the PR agency’s checks!!

Today, and based upon the Gap experience, this dictatorship style of brand change … where one person or one small, internal group within an organization have final say on a brand change … doesn’t seem to fly as well. In fact, I would say it’s counterproductive to today’s open engagement trends where companies spend countless hours and monies to better connect with their customer and fan bases. What is the point, in fact, in making all those connections and penetrating all those online communities that favor your brand or your business only to then carve them out entirely on highly-visible decisions impacting their experience with your brand???

Today, opening the doors to your business’ fans, friends, likers, followers and patrons in what used to be internal-only decisions such as these would not only be a welcome act … I would say now it’s practically expected.

Obviously, the extent of openly sharing one’s marketing intent or encouraging external parties to provide comments or feedback on an organization’s brand and identity change will vary greatly from business to business. Not every business clearly has Gap’s reach, budget or social graph. Still, organizations of all shapes and sizes can learn from this Gap fiasco and apply some aspects of openness in marketing.

These are different times in marketing and those who carry the marketing torch for their companies will heed to the open-marketing trend where your fans, customers, vendors and patrons will want some opportunity, large or small, to help you define what their experience with your brand will or should be.

Your comments are welcome …

UPDATE

After I wrote this post, coincidentally bumped into the Nightly News segment on the Gap brand fiasco. Enjoy!