If you were scheduled for surgery a couple of weeks ago, or if you're a Chilean miner, you may have missed the whole story. A skillion-dollar retail chain decided what they needed to do was update their tired old logo.
Sounds like someone ascended to a new position, doesn't it? Everything was fine, and then Jerry was elevated to Grand High Communications Pooh-Baah. And how are you going to keep a job like that, if you can't point to something You Have Done? So the gears were engaged that resulted in a new, hip, groovy logo for the Gap. This kind of thing happens fairly often in Biddness, and it scares me.
I took a Marketing class a couple of years ago and it was full of these kinds of misadventures. Volkswagen, sixty years of dependable, economical, modest transportation, a brand that clearly communicated its products. Someone sitting in the Big Chair there decided they would move up-market to take on mighty Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi. They brought to market a Volkswagen that cost as much as two. These are much prized on the used-car market, today. The original 2004 sold modestly, but you have to give these things a chance. After 2006, it was clear that people who wanted to spend Mercedes money on cars wanted… Mercedes. You cannot today buy a new Volkswagen Phaeton.
The New Coke story was interesting. Pepsi was kicking their hiney on TV urging people to "Take the Pepsi Challenge!" Most people who did found they preferred the taste of Pepsi to the taste of Coke. They were buying Coke more out of habit. So, Coke developed a formula that tasted great a paper cup mouthful at a time. In test after test, it beat Pepsi and it beat Coca-Cola. But in 12oz quantities it was almost awful. Coke beat a hasty retreat from the formula after weeks, in those pre-internet days.
So it made me wonder about Marketing. How valid a field of study is it, if you can get so much so wrong? It's hard to imagine Coke or Gap or Volkswagen really deciding to change a logo, to enter a new market or to burn down the secret recipe that had brought it so much success on a whim. There must have been studies, there must have been spreadsheets that comforted people and led them to believe that what they were doing was A Good Thing.
Sure, there may have been problems with the methodology. Our most-recent Web site was tested in several settings, including an audience of tractor buyers and quilt judgers at the state fair, and a great hue and cry went up when some percentage could not locate the huge "Enroll Now!" button at the top of the screen, which led to the enrollment Web page, of course. The case they made was that we were losing enrollment, I guess. Based on the actions of their parents, college kids were thought to be unable to figure out how to sign-up and sign-on and become future alumni and send Large Checks to the school for years to come. I was mildly worried, at first. And then I remembered: Enrollment was up, this year and last. Hmm….
Gap had a box that identified the store and the clothing, everywhere except on the radio. A darkish medium-blue field, square, with all capitals spelling G A P in the center, in a tall, skinny, serifed font ( Spire Regular ) cast in white. Beautiful? Maybe not, but certainly elegant.
As things happened, the Gap folks backed down almost immediately, and abandoned the Helvetica capital-G, lower-cased a and p, dark against an indistinct white background, with an odd smudge of dark blue gradient offset behind and above the p. Helvetica is great for signage, and there was a wonderful movie about it a few years ago. But it's not the visible face of the Gap.
But shouldn't someone have known this? Shouldn't someone have stopped them?
3 comments:
It sounds like you're saying that we already know everything we need to know? :) Are you insinuating that experimentation doesn't pay off, or that failure isn't the greatest opportunity to learn?
I'm sorry if it came off like that. What I was pointing out is that an awful lot of people sit in big chairs making piles of money and they don't apparently have to be very good at what they do. It's kind of like being a weatherman, maybe. You can take all of the measurements and make your education guess, but if it turns out wrong, you can just say "Hey, it's the weather" and go on. People committed tons of dollars, hours and calories to these various projects and it just seems like someone could have told them LONG before they started that this wasn't going to be a good idea.
Oh yeah, I know... just saying there's a balance (and it did read a little conservative). :) btw, along the lines of having better tools to "know" before you go public with something, take a look at "Can neuroscience help Gap produce a better logo?" Perhaps the fuzziness of focus groups can become more scientific some day in the not-so-distant future.
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