The Gap is one of America’s great companies, and sales are declining, despite an innovation effort to rejuvenate the brand. I have consulted in strategy and consumer insights for Gap brand (Gap, Inc. also owns Old Navy and Banana Republic), so I have to be reasonably tempered about what I say, but I have some thoughts on Gap brand’s direction (based on publicly available information).
There was an interesting front page story in the WSJ last week about Gap and its huge initiative to renovate stores. Gap sent a whopping 20 employees around the world in search of inspiration for innovative retail concepts and although the new store design is a great improvement, chalk boards in the jeans area, friendly employees, darker floors, couches outside the dressing areas, higher quality display tables, and bold colors on the walls don’t “wow” me.
A part of Gap’s new, defining mission is to enable individuals to express their personal style. Building on this theme (William Morris and CAA, here’s an idea for you to sell to Gap) select celebrities could create their own product lines and Gap co-branded marketing campaigns, and sell their product in little boutiques within the store and online. Another idea: there could be a section on the Gap website, and computer terminals in stores, where customers can design their own t-shirts (ie pick out colors, images, text etc.) This type of democratization for creating individual style, which is facilitated by technology, is the future, and Gap should embrace it now!
Innovative store features and an “emotional” store environment will only go so far, of course. Obviously, the store’s product is number 1, and I’m not particularly in touch with the latest trends and styles, so I’m not going to talk about that. But, I can talk about its television advertising, which Gap relies heavily on to drive store traffic. The television ad spot is losing marketing power, as a result of ad skipping technology (I may be talking about innovative marketing strategies - Gap is experimenting with a viral website - watchmechange.com, for example), but Gap ads have been uninspired for years, and even hurtful to its brand image — with respect to men — and this is going to take time to change.
When I consulted for Gap, there was much discussion about how to fix the declining men’s business. Meanwhile, Sarah Jessica Parker was all over television praising the color pink, and singing about how wonderful it is to be a girl! I know many guys that agree with me in thinking that this kind of advertising does not entice us to shop at Gap! The Gap’s “singing and dancing” ads have played way too long, and I’m truly thankful that Gap is allegedly starting to move away from that.
This picture of the remodeled Stanford Shopping Center store was taken a few days ago. The outside of a store is not as important as the inside store experience, but a vibrant outside can be a magnet for traffic.
Imagine if they had billboard type video image panels above the windows in those blank white spaces on the wall. This technology may still be relatively expensive, but I’m not talking about HD plasma quality video. The displays also don’t have to be used across the entire store fleet, but just top performing stores.
January 17th, 2006 at 12:36 am
Excellent post, Matt. A few thoughts. First of all, as someone who doesn’t normally shop at malls, I had no idea Gap was re-doing their stores. If this is a big a deal as it sounds, they need to let people know somehow. Whenever a company as big as Gap decides to drastically change things, even I (not a Gap customer) am curious to see what’s going on. Get people in the stores and get them talking about it. Second, they need to stop not only the singing and dancing ads as Matt pointed out, but the use of celebrities all-together. It’s condescending to customers and let’s face it, we all know that none of them would ever be caught dead in a Gap. Gap needs to somehow emphasize the uniqueness of the individual, and highlight how it is that they can help people express themselves. Matt, you hit on this beautifully and Gap is definately behind the curve in that area. Lastly, I think Gap should take a long hard look at what American Apparel is doing. Realistically speaking, AA is the company shaking things up the most in the retail world. The differences are that AA has an emotional story behind it (they make everything in LA and pay their workers good wages), their ads utilize REAL people instead of celebrities, and their all-white stores highlight the colorful clothing. I don’t know if it’s possible for Gap to come up with an emotional story, maybe highlight the company’s history when it wasn’t such a huge corporate giant. I think that maybe sizing down the stores would help as well. Again, anything that can be done to make Gap seem less like a giant will be a good move for them in the future.
January 18th, 2006 at 2:04 am
Who can forget the Sarah Jessica Parker ads! The bad aftertaste from that annoying commerical still lingers.
January 18th, 2006 at 4:01 am
There’s an excellent post on a Yahoo GPS finance message board:
“Redesign Stores? That would be like telling GM and Ford that their showrooms are the problem.”
January 23rd, 2006 at 8:38 pm
Where are you located? They did some test-stores here in Colorado, and I actually found them to be quite a change. It’s sad that they still don’t ‘get it’ and are afraid to be down right remarkable– but they’re moving in the right direction. Question is, how fast can they do it?
January 29th, 2006 at 6:50 pm
[…] As a supplement to my suggestion to Gap that they offer a way for people to design their own apparel, I have discovered several companies that are offering customized product opportunities. […]