The US Brand GAP:7 Is Short Changed For &Nbsp. Why Is It So Popular?

Old bottleneck: too long, too old, and now

New standard proposition: brand new changes, let

Third party observation: a brand

"The brand is yours, but also ours, but in the final analysis, it is yours".

At the moment, the senior public relations experts of the GAP brand marketing department should understand the meaning of this sentence after the strong objection from the consumers.

In October 4, 2010, GAP, the largest clothing brand in the United States, issued a new logo on its official website gap.com without warning, replacing the old blue bottom white logo that has been used for more than 20 years.

Just a few minutes later, GAP fans began to express their dissatisfaction with the new logo on various social media.

To ridicule this rough Logo, which looks like PPT produced by temporary crashing, "vulgar" and "uncharacteristic" have become the most widely used evaluation words.

Soon, GAP's new logo became the focus of social networking and the object of insane taunting. The bid change operation was pformed into a downright public relations disaster.

On the evening of October 11, 2010, GAP had to withdraw the new standard and return the old Logo.

GAP changing the standard to annoy many fans

The new standard did not calm down the anger of loyal customers, and consumers' taunts about GAP's reckless behavior continued.

Netizens made the Logo generator of the new GAP style, and entered any letter to generate the logo of GAP recalled Logo style.

Some people have changed the logo of each famous brand into a new style of GAP, to ridicule this scheme without design sense.

Of course, some enthusiastic designers began to design their own ideal new targets for GAP, most of which seem more reliable than the official version of GAP.

After the failure of the bid, GAP replaced the brand marketing director, appointed the first chief marketing officer in the company history, and re chose the brand creative business.

It should be said that it is very rare to change the label once and cause such a large market turmoil and a series of chain reactions.

What fatal mistakes did GAP make in this operation?

Trout's positioning theory reveals a simple and profound truth for us: once a brand takes a place in the minds of consumers, it is almost impossible to change the image and position it again.

As the largest clothing brand in the United States, GAP is a synonym for quality assurance, good quality and low price in the eyes of consumers.

GAP has nothing to do with fashion. More brand elements are moderation and popularity.

The biggest mistake of the GAP replacement is to choose a new design without inheritance.

Without the full communication with consumers, this unexpected design has caused them great uneasiness. Over the past decades, the brand image and positioning of GAP accumulated in the minds of consumers have been broken, which has brought a shock to consumers' brand cognition.

People usually like things to develop according to their expectations. If there are accidents, they must be good changes.

The new GAP didn't do this, but it only brought the brand cognitive burden to consumers. It was not surprising that it received so many negative comments.

American marketing expert (see marketing expert blog) Craig Smith believes that GAP attempts to change the brand image when the product is unchanged, which is a common mistake made by business operators.

In other words, even if the new design of GAP is perfect, its contribution to the promotion of GAP brand image can only be minimal.

If the market positioning of the product has changed under the original brand, the best public relations plan should be the all-round evolution of the brand, from the product itself to the marketing propaganda means, and then to the visual image identification.

Only relying on the way of modifying Logo can not convey the information of brand positioning effectively.

In addition, the intention of GAP's bid change is not clear.

GAP group has three major brands under its jurisdiction, and its market segmentation has been very perfect.

GAP brand positioning in the general public, on top of it has fashionable BananaRepublic, under which there is a cheap brand OldNavy.

From the aspects of pricing and sales channels, BananaRepublic, GAP and OldNavy also formed good echelons.

Especially in the price space, the three brands have been very close. For the GAP brand in the middle, there is not much room to adjust the brand positioning.

Moreover, the current GAP brand already has many sub brands such as GAP, GAPKids and babyGAP, and the market segmentation is basically completed.

In this situation, it is really hard to understand why GAP has changed its bid.

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Enterprises should be rational in changing their bidding.

There are usually several reasons why enterprises change their bid. For example, business will enter the international market. Changing the corporate logo that is consistent with international practice will help enhance brand awareness.

M & A is another important reason for changing the bid.

Of course, the most frequent change is when the strategy or market strategy changes significantly.

Recently, the new global logo issued by Starbucks removed the word "StarbucksCoffee" in the original logo, but only retained the double tail Mermaid pattern.

Despite the aesthetic perspective, the new monochrome logo is not as good as the original black green Logo, but this behavior marks Starbucks's attempt to create products other than coffee.

But even such a clear purpose of changing bid has attracted a lot of consumer objections.

How can we do this successfully?

Business operators should clearly realize that the brand and its subsidiary logo, appearance and other elements are not unique to the enterprise, but shared with consumers.

Especially for those brands with strong emotional dependence, the ownership awareness of consumers is more powerful.

Without the full communication of consumers, especially with loyal customers, unauthorized changes in brand attributes will give them an angry feeling of deprivation of ownership.

Especially when brand new attributes such as labels are not recognized by people, this anger will turn into a public relations disaster.

GAP made at least two mistakes in the bid change: making a momentous decision carelessly, and the new logo did not play any positive brand communication role.

In contrast, the latter is relatively easy to solve. After all, the quality of design is objective.

And the full communication with consumers before action is deliberately ignored by many business operators.

In fact, in front of the brand, consumers are always disadvantaged groups, because they are followers rather than leaders, and can be educated to most of the commodities that are fond of specific commodities, such as the success of "brain platinum".

However, education is a process that requires time to pave the way.

In the process of enterprise pformation, it is necessary to have a sufficiently long preheating period.

During the warm-up period, consumers should be allowed to participate fully in a big discussion which is completely open on the surface but actually guided by the enterprise.

Before the new logo appeared on the official website and products of the enterprise, it should have been exposed through a large area of the media, so that the loyal customers of the brand will have some familiarity and intimacy.

All this is just the homework neglected by GAP.

As clothing and other products that can show buyers' taste in life, brand emotional dependence is often stronger than ordinary goods.

GAP underestimated the difficulty of the problem, causing a catastrophic failure is not surprising.

From the GAP incident, we can sum up a few advice to consumers who are planning to change their brands.

First, do not change the brand logo that has been used for a long time unless absolutely necessary.

Two, if we have to change the standard, we must find a very good reason and communicate with consumers in advance.

Three, the design of new logo can be carried out by crowdsourcing, or the announcement scheme will be carried out by popular vote.

The process of the new standard is not important. The important thing is that the result must be well designed to fully carry the logo and the brand idea.

Four, the new standard release is the beginning of the bid change process rather than the end.

The interpretation and pmission of new promotion and pformation of business strategy should become a long-term work for enterprises.

Finally, remember that brand image is the common property of enterprises and consumers.

When you are dealing with a common property, you must consult with the other party, don't you?