“Gap’s Fall into the Mushy Middle”

I choose to read the blog entitled “Gap’s Fall into the Mushy Middle”. Laura Ries goes into discussing how GAP should not have changed their logo and I agree with her. Once a company has established a logo and has a lot of success with it, they should stick to what works. There has been a lot of negative criticism on the Internet about GAP and its logo change. 

Laura Ries states, “Well, we got the specifics today. Gap is scraping the new logo, scraping the idea of letting consumers participate in creating a new logo and going back to the old logo. Good for them. At least they admitted they were wrong and did the right thing to correct it.”
I’m glad t see that GAP has realized what they did was not needed to to effectively help their brand. The change in the logo did not enhance their brand in the eyes of their consumers; it actually took away from it. 

 Laura Ries also talks about Gap attempting to expand.

“When management sees the great success of its brand, the next thing they usually say is, “What else can we get into with our hot brand?” The answer is usually trouble.
Gap expanded into four varieties: GapBody, GapKids, GapBaby and regular Gap.
Teenagers and 20-somethings don’t want to wear the same outfits as kids and babies. All the expansion diluted the power of the Gap brand. And it diluted the time and energy of management. Instead of thinking about how to make the Gap better. They were focused on building the line-extension stores like GapKids, GapBaby and GapBody.

We have seen this type of extension disasters before.

After the success of Blockbuster, management expanded and introduced Blockbuster Music stores. They should have stayed focused on movies. Today Blockbuster is bankrupted and trapped in the mushy middle between Netflix and Red Box.”

In most cases, companies usually get themselves in trouble trying to expand their brand as Laura Ries stated above. As a consumer, I can see the effects that expansion has on a companies brand. When I walk into a store, I usally already have in mind what brand of a product I want to purchase. By a company expanding, it takes my focus of the initial brand and that had me hooked as a consumer.

Reference:
http://ries.typepad.com/ries_blog/2010/10/gaps-fall-into-the-mushy-middle.html