When Bad Things Happen To Good Brands.

See for yourself…

The Original Logo

On October 4th this became the new logo

And on October 11th...they returned to the old logo

On Monday October 4th, the executives of this beloved brand chose to re-brand themselves with a new logo and the outrage of the public went viral. (As of course any bad Marketing Strategy these days does.)

Now as someone who has been in the Advertising/Marketing industry for 8+ years I can tell you first hand that re-branding isn’t always the best idea.  I have seen a number of campaigns that have gone sour after a re-branding attempt.

Examples:

Tropicana

Sun Chips

Gatorade

The New Coke

Why do these companies keep doing this?  Honestly it’s so frustrating when these things happen, especially for someone like me who is on the agency side of things and knows that more than likely the “Creative” team working on that logo re-design at the New York Agency Laird & Partners had something way better then what they ended up going with, you can be sure about that.  I’d be willing to bet money that what they had was shot down by the execs at Gap and they were told to go back to the drawing board. Now can I prove that? No, and I could be wrong, but chances are I’m not.

Take a moment to look at this video…this is what it’s really like to be on the agency side! What if there were no stop signs, and a major corporation was charged with inventing one? They'd brief their agency and let them do it. Sorta. Welcome to corporate creativity, where groupthink and endless revisions help good ideas get executed.

But this isn’t just about the bad logo, it’s about how quickly and in such a massive way the outrage against the new logo went viral on Twitter, and Facebook.  And within hours there were sites like Crap Logo Yourself created to mock the brand.  But what’s truly amazing is that it’s being tagged as a Social Media success story.

These days brands have to listen to what their customers are saying on the social media network because if they don’t, it could cost them millions of dollars and not just that, but their integrity.  Companies need to consider whether or not they are going to loose their “brand loyal” customers if they make a massive branding change.

Has Gap learned their lesson?  Have other brand's learned from this experience? 

We will have to wait and see…