I applaud people for embracing social media. Every day I get to reject another fan page invite from someone I'm not even sure if I've met because of social media. Wednesday I'm browsing through my Facebook live feed and notice a friend's status that simply says "Gap's new logo (vomit)." 5 seconds of research and I pull up a few news articles sputtering about the abomination Gap just unleashed on the world. I stare at my screen for a few minutes, legitimately thinking this is a hoax. How can a company with millions of dollars in sales and years of longevity put forth such a terrible logo? It's a classic mistake made by floundering companies. The word "reinvent" gets thrown around at all the meetings and suddenly, there's a new logo. Granted, if you have a terrible logo to begin with, yes, redesign it to something that doesn't suck. But when you're logo isn't terrible to begin with, you probably shouldn't create a new one that people will laugh at. In Gap's case, whether or not the original logo is good or bad to begin with isn't in question, the point it that a consumer could happen upon it and immediately desire a brand new spankin' pair of jeans, if you're into that sort of thing at least—no judgement.
Back to Gap's new logo's terribleness, the logo does indeed look as if a designer got paid some absurd amount of money to make up a new logo in, oh, 2 seconds. And 2 seconds is about how long it took for the uproar to start. It started slowly, mostly a lot of "designers" and designers muttering about how awful it was. Then the whole world blew up. You could hardly be on Twitter or Facebook without hearing spills about the crappiness of the new logo or links to articles talking about the crappiness of the new logo. Gap's new logo sparked new Twitter accounts supposedly created by the new and old logos themselves. The fires were stoked and it was an all out riot. At least as much of a riot as can occur with typing furiously in 140 characters or less at a time.
So, what? Big deal, lots of people who know how to use Photoshop's gradient tool are spewing hate about a logo and nostalgic customers are crying for the logo they know and love. Like it matters.
Oh but how it does matter. The outcry was so feather-ruffling that Gap updated their Facebook fan page with this statement:
Thanks for everyone’s input on the new logo! We’ve had the same logo for 20+ years, and this is just one of the things we’re changing. We know this logo created a lot of buzz and we’re thrilled to see passionate debates unfolding! So much so we’re asking you to share your designs. We love our version, but we’d like to... see other ideas. Stay tuned for details in the next few days on this crowd sourcing project.
To which I interpret:
"We realized our new logo sucked worse than dead babies and was a waste of some absurd amount of money, so can anyone design a better one for free because, well, we just wasted a ton of money. Perhaps even your grandma has an idea in mind."
Now I'm sure Gap will offer somesort of compensation to whoever designs their new logo (because they will pick a new logo. They'll pick a new logo or have thousands of pounds of hate mail and threats delivered to their homes and offices until they do). But the point is, the opinions coming in through Facebook, Twitter and email shook a big corporation like Gap enough for them to open the door for redesigning their logo.
And that, my friends, is the power of Social Media in today's culture.
