Mind the Gap

If you’ve spent any time in the London Underground, you’ve been well conditioned by its public address system to “mind the gap,” i.e., take care when boarding across the open space between platform and train. It’s good advice.

And considering the recent marketing experience of retail clothing giant The Gap, the phrase may be taken as especially good advice for those of us in the business of influencing the conversation between a brand and its consumers.

The Gap provided us with an example of how, in a consumer world transformed by social media, a business can quickly lose control over the conversation among its loyal buyers. The company, long recognizable by white “GAP” letters in a dark-blue box, unveiled a new logo bearing little resemblance to its predecessor. Its stated intention was to update its image.

Literally within hours, a tide of complaints, jokes, and other expressions of disapproval from Gap fans began to rise via social networks, most notably Facebook and Twitter. Websites soon displayed parodies of the new logo. Before The Gap had any shot at a traditional product launch or promotional campaign—before TV viewers could see the logo on real denim over an actual body—Facebook users could choose between joining a group that “hated” the new logo or one that thought it “sucked.”

Two weeks later, The Gap announced it was going back to its old logo.

Traditional media have since been commenting on The Gap’s apparent folly. Some are simply sneering, as they did after the failure of New Coke in the 1980s. Others are trying to pin down the underlying aesthetic problem, offering opinions from “neuromarketers” on why the new logo “made our brains angry.”

My brain is elsewhere. As someone in the business of building meaningful relationships between brands and their consumers, I’m mindful of The Gap and of this particular marketing failure. But my real interest is in the process. I’m interested in how quickly consumers wrested control over the new logo from The Gap and dismissed the company from the marketing conversation. That conversation took place exclusively among consumers, who then rendered a verdict.

There’s an important lesson in all this, but it doesn’t have much to do with The Gap’s logo design or how it affected our neurotransmitters. The lesson, and we’re seeing countless examples of it every day, is that social networks have not only changed the conversation between brands and consumers—they’ve changed what it means to have a conversation.

Social media has connected consumers worldwide according to shared interests—according to their tribes. And smartphones have put these social networks right in the hands or pockets of consumers who chat, compare notes, post ratings, create their own spin, and generate their own buzz—all without intervention from a would-be marketer.

Every day, millions of dollars of purchasing decisions are made as the result of conversations that were impossible five years ago. Clothes are picked out and movies and restaurants are chosen after just a few minutes with a mobile device. And, as Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg told The New York Times, “Nothing influences a person more than a recommendation from a trusted friend.”

The Gap was just the latest company to learn a hard lesson about how the conversation has changed. But it’s absurd to think The Gap’s experience was anything like the marketing failure of New Coke twenty-five years ago. Coca-Cola’s attempt to change its product was conventional. By the standards of the day, consumer reaction against New Coke was swift, but the verdict wasn’t rendered until there had been a massive media launch followed by counterattacks from the competition. In every way, it was a battle in conventional media between conventional advertising gladiators. Coca-Cola never lost control of its message; it just lost a marketing bet.

By contrast, The Gap logo never got off the launch pad. But it might have. The Gap considered using crowdsourcing in developing the logo. That might have created a more egalitarian mood as the conversation moved to the social networks. At the very least, making smart use of the social networks would have enabled the company to remain in the conversation over its own brand.

Social networks show us that businesses and marketers can no longer control the conversation about their own brands. The best we can do is influence that conversation. In the age of social media, brands will simply confront one disaster after another if we fail to integrate effective social networking into our marketing strategies. 

(This article first appeared on researchaccess.com.)