Gap's new logo lasted a week, because the blue box belonged to its customers

In early October 2010 Gap changed its logo without an announcement. The tall white serif capitals in a navy square, the mark the brand had used for about two decades, gave way on its website to the name set in Helvetica, black on white, with a small blue gradient square tucked behind the top corner of the “p”. There was no launch campaign, no explanation of what the change was meant to say and no new collection attached to it.

The reaction ran through channels that were still new for brands. Thousands of comments landed on Gap’s Facebook page, most of them hostile, a parody account for the new logo gathered followers on Twitter, and designers turned the wordmark into a running joke. Gap then posted that it would like to see other designs from the public, which drew a second wave of criticism. By October 12 the company had announced that the blue box would return across all its channels, and Marka Hansen, then president of Gap’s North American business, acknowledged that the company had gone about the change the wrong way. The new logo had lasted about a week.

Fixing the part that worked

Gap’s real trouble in 2010 was in the clothes. Sales had been weak for several years, and coverage of the period described a brand squeezed between cheaper fast fashion and pricier labels. The blue box was one of the few things still doing its job: recognisable from the far end of a shopping mall, and linked in many people’s memories to the brand’s best years of khakis, hoodies and denim.

Seen from outside, that makes the sequence odd. A company with a product problem changed the one asset that was no part of the problem. Our method starts every repositioning with an inventory of assets, and this is one of the reasons it exists: it shows which parts of the identity are still earning, so the budget for change goes to the parts that are not.

Who owns a logo

Legally, Gap owned the mark. Emotionally, its customers did, and the internet of 2010 gave them a way to say so in public. We place this kind of asset in the community and narrative families. It lives in shared memories, in old photographs and in the shopping bags people carried as teenagers, and everyone who holds those memories feels a share of it. A change to such an asset reaches people as a change to their own past, and they react as owners would.

New Coke in 1985 is the classic version of this ownership, played out through phone calls and letters over 79 days. Gap was among the first to live it on social media, where the reaction is visible, shareable and quick. The time between a decision about a shared asset and the public verdict on it had shrunk from months to days, and every company with a recognisable mark inherited that new clock.

Inviting the owners to redraw it

The crowdsourcing post is the move we find most instructive. Asking customers to propose a logo straight after they had rejected one sounded to many like asking them to do the company’s work for free, and it confirmed the suspicion that no clear idea stood behind the change. Co-creation earns goodwill when it happens upstream, while the question is still open. Offered as damage control, it tells people the brief was empty.

A logo is also a promise in shorthand. The blue box said classic American basics, consistent and familiar. The new wordmark was meant to look more contemporary, as the company explained at the time, yet nothing in the stores had changed to prove it. A symbol that announces a new promise before the product delivers it asks customers to trade a memory they value for something they cannot see yet, and few people accept that trade.

What the week bought

The reversal came fast enough to limit the damage, and Gap kept the blue box. The episode did not cause the brand’s later difficulties, nor did it solve any of them. Its lasting value is as a reference point, cheap and seen by the whole industry, on the order in which changes should be made. The symbol moves when the product has given it something new to say.

When customers feel they own part of your identity, train your team to list those shared assets and to decide what each change gives back before any of them is touched.