Gap Goes Back!

We just posted our take on the Gap logo debacle story yesterday, and just as soon as we pressed “post” the company announced that they would be going back to the old logo. Just yesterday, the new mark was live on their website; today, the controversial mark is just a fleeting memory.

This isn’t the first time consumers have revolted online to a marketing flub. Take last year’s Tropicana mess for example. This story had many parallels to the Gap logo – in both cases, the audience felt the updated identities fell flat of the spirit of the originals. But the takeaway here is probably less about the fact that Gap came out with a logo that nobody liked, and much more about the power consumers have now with social media.

Gap made the announcement yesterday on its Facebook page. Says president Marka Hansen:

“Since we rolled out an updated version of our logo last week on our website, we’ve seen an outpouring of comments from customers and the online community in support of the iconic blue box logo. Last week, we moved to address the feedback and began exploring how we could tap into all of the passion. Ultimately, we’ve learned just how much energy there is around our brand. All roads were leading us back to the blue box, so we’ve made the decision not to use the new logo on gap.com any further. At Gap brand, our customers have always come first. We’ve been listening to and watching all of the comments this past week. We heard them say over and over again they are passionate about our blue box logo, and they want it back. So we’ve made the decision to do just that – we will bring it back across all channels. In the meantime, the website will go back to our iconic blue box logo and, for Holiday, we’ll turn our blue box red for our seasonal campaign.”

“We’ve learned a lot in this process. And 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. This wasn’t the right project at the right time for crowd sourcing. There may be a time to evolve our logo, but if and when that time comes, we’ll handle it in a different way.”