Gap Asked the Public to Design Its Logo

In October 2010, one of the best-known clothing brands in the world asked the public for ideas on how its logo should look. It did so in the middle of a crisis of its own making, a few days after replacing a logo that had sat on its clothes and shop fronts for twenty years, and the request, meant as openness, landed as a confession. A brand that asks the public what it should look like has just admitted it does not know who it is.

The new mark had appeared on the website on October 6, overnight, colder and more generic, the famous blue box shrunk to a timid square in one corner, with no explanation that went beyond press-release words, modern, contemporary, relevant, the kind of words that can be said about anything and say nothing. Within hours the networks filled with protests, parodies and fake accounts mocking the new sign. People were not debating whether it was pretty. They were asking why.

Less than a week later the old logo was back, on October 12. Marka Hansen, who ran Gap in North America, said the company had learned a great deal and was clear that it had not gone about this the right way, and that if the time ever came to evolve the logo, they would handle it differently. The new logo entered the marketing textbooks under the chapter on warnings, which is the only place it was ever seen again.

Taste can be argued forever and to no purpose, so I will leave it aside. The more telling fact is that nobody inside the company could give, in those six days, a reason for the change, and nobody could give one because it had never been written down. A logo can change. Great brands have done it, some more than once, and the market followed, but always from a written line that says what the old sign no longer stands for, what has changed in the company so that the sign must change too. When that line is missing, the change is just somebody's boredom, someone inside who has looked at the same logo too long, paid for out of the recognition everyone else built up over twenty years without being consulted.

Recognition is the most expensive thing a brand owns and the only one it cannot buy outright. It accumulates from millions of small encounters, a bag, a label, a shop window, until people stop reading the sign and simply know it, the way you know a face without examining its features. A logo change sweeps all of that away at once and asks people to start over. That can be asked. But whoever asks needs a reason the size of the request, and "it looked tired" describes the mood of someone who sees the logo every day far better than it describes the person who sees it once a month in a mall.

The public consultation, the gesture that was supposed to rescue the situation, showed the mechanism most clearly. The public does not want to design your logo. It wants to know that someone inside knows why it looks the way it does. When the company asks, it proves that it does not know, and from that moment no logo, however good, fixes anything, because the real question concerned the hand holding the sign.

The Gap episode repeats every year in ordinary businesses too, smaller and without the parodies, as the website rebuilt because the old one "didn't look right anymore," the business cards changed three times in five years, the tone of voice that moves with every new marketing hire. Each change spends some of the recognition that had been saved up, and nobody keeps the books, because recognition appears on no balance sheet until the day it is gone.

If a new logo has crossed your mind, stop first at a couple of questions. When did you last change something visible about your company because it looked tired, rather than because a written line required it? And if a customer asked you tomorrow why your brand looks the way it does, would you have an answer that goes beyond "we liked it"? I will ask you for one thing. Write the line that says what your sign stands for before you feel like changing it, because it is the one line Gap did not have to hand during those six days.