The Side Note

We didn’t get the opportunity on The Side Note Blog to write about the (totally crappy) new Gap logo and how much it sucked, because it only lasted a week. It reminds me of the introduction of “New Coke” in the mid-‘80s, when one can’t help but wonder “what were they thinking?”

At our agency’s weekly production meeting yesterday we had a long discussion about the (totally crappy) new Gap logo and wondered if only marketing people would be so outraged by the lack of design, thought or artistic value. And if only our PR people could spin it as, “but look at all the press coverage they are getting.”

The answer came later yesterday when Gap decided that the 2,000 comments on its Facebook page were enough to pull the new (totally crappy) logo and go back to the old one.  I love these comments…

Melody Fraser Marka Hansen you need to fire yourself and the marketing team who decided to mess with good branding. Also you have insulted professionally trained Graphic Designers every where by your “lets get anyone to design a logo through FB”.

Rebekah Del Collo I hate it. It looks cheap. Looks like you could not hire someone to do a design so you just decided to look through clipart and use like a default design that just popped up.

In a statement that was picked up by Reuters, Marka Hansen, president of Gap Brand North America, put a nice spin on the reversal of plans:

“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.”

Let’s be honest here, I don’t know if the audience was passionate about the old logo or just passionately against the (totally crappy) new logo.

But this story has a nice lesson to it, social media can work for your company. By having a social presence and being a part of the online dialogue, the Gap heard its constituents, listened and made an expedient change.

I have heard a lot of CEOs in the healthcare, service and financial industries continue to say that they fear social media and the issues around “what if someone posts something bad about my company?”

My response is always the same:

They are already posting bad things about your company. Someone is always unhappy. If you are in the conversation you can deal with it. If you turn away from the conversations or don’t know about them, you can’t address the problems and the problems will continue to grow.

Gap was in the conversation, saw the issue and dealt with it. That is one way to effectively use social media to the corporate advantage, even when a mistake was made. I applaud Gap for making the change back to the old logo.

However, if this entire exercise was just for the PR exposure, as some have strongly suggested, I will have to re-write this entire blog posting.