Logo No-go?

A few weeks ago, The Gap, the worldwide brand we all know and love, attempted to update its iconic logo. And failed miserably.

In an attempt to keep in line with the modern direction the company's style is moving in, they threw out the classic navy background with white lettering, for a simple white background with black letters and a small blue box behind the "p". For lack of better words, it looked like The Gap hired a teenager with minimal clipart capabilities to design it.

Immediately after the release of the new logo, an outpour of response began to flood in on the company's Facebook and Twitter, none of which praised this change.

More than anything, people were confused. They did not understand why The Gap needed a new logo or why it just "showed up" out of nowhere. The most common criticisms of the new logo called it boring, uncreative, and amateur. None of these are qualities that would be successfully marketable.

In an attempt to use their customer's opinions towards solving the dilemma, the company tried "crowd-sourcing". Through social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook, the company opened the field for it's customers to submit their best logo re-designs.

Ultimately, The Gap received even more criticism from the poorly planned and poorly handled crowd-sourcing attempt and scrapped that plan all together as well. A week after they first released the new logo, they officially threw it away and returned back to the tried and true original "Gap" logo.

The company acknowledged that the entire logo process had been a mistake and they had not gone about the process in the correct way. They realized that they missed a huge opportunity to engage the social media in the process of re-designing the logo.

Today's brands are being forced to realize that social media is completely changing the playing field between companies and customers. Consumers have the option of communicating with the brands in a public setting, where the brands must immediately acknowledge their successes and failures.

Never before have customers been playing such a large role in making changes in these billion dollar corporations. With out a doubt, the redesigned Gap logo would not have been as widely spread or known in that amount of time without the use of social media.

While The Gap clearly made mistakes in its introduction of this logo, some say it may not have been a mistake at all. Claims that the logo was never meant for use and that this entire ploy was a marketing scheme are circulating, and personally I think they might be right. The Gap could have never generated this much publicity for itself without creating a scandal, but luckily this scandal is easy to get rid of.