Gap Yeezy does it.

This week global fashion house GAP announced a 10 year brand partnership with Kanye West’s Yeezy. West’s Yeezy colloboration with shoe brand Adidas had already produced something like $1b in new sales, so it’s probably a great thing for both West and GAP to ink a deal. 

Butwhat does it say about the GAP brand itself?

A quick survey of posts and discussion threads across Google will probably give you a good assessment of the current state of the GAP brand over the past five years. It’s trading on a legacy and is directionless and in decline. Sure, it’s still a billion dollar clothing house, booking $2.11b in sales in June but that’s down from $3.71 for the same time in 2019. A fall of near half is not unusual in these Covid times, when retail activity around the world has 

either paused or gone into reverse, but it does also expose GAP to its fundamental problem. 

What is its brand now and what is its strategy?

Much like JCrew, who recently fell into bankruptcy and administration after years of direction seeking, GAP continues along a well trod middle market path without much strategic and creative direction — neither fashion-leading like European rivals H&M and Zara, both of whom have managed to weather the vagaries of Covid or even price-led like the department stores Sears and Macy’s. The latter more likely than ever now to be suffering even more because of their market spread and reliance on hard real estate.

Put simply, Gap is behaving eponymously. It doesn’t serve a gap in the market, it doesn’t really know anymore what part of the market its appealing to, it’s continually discounting to maintain same store sales and its product isn’t particularly differentiated and not really that interesting — whether it’s the Gap itself or the brands it owns — Banana Republic, Old Navy or even Athleta — they’re all much the same and not very different without their fascias.

So while the Yeezy partnership seems a smart proposition and hopefully will rub off some valuable brand visibility alongside of cheap Yeezy sales volume, it’s only a patch and still doesn’t solve the issue — what is the Gap brand about and what strategy should it be pursuing to more fully differentiate itself in a crowded and a now declining market. 

And should, dare I say it — it become GapYeezy and fulfill the dreams of its erstwhile design partner Kanye, who was once the only black employee of a Gap store in his hometown Chicago and may even be more likely than West’s recently announced Presidential bid. 

For more brand updates go see www.brandnews.substack.com and subscribe

Facebook don’t be evil. It doesn’t suit anyone.

“We build technologies to give people the power to connect with friends and family, find communities and grow businesses.” from the FACEBOOK purpose statement.

One part of Facebook’s brand positioning (or is it Mark Zuckerberg’s?) is built around its desire to not be “arbiters of truth” and this position entailing non-censorship of political, violent or racist posts on its platform, is starting to look decidedly precarious. Not only does it reflect the company’s moral ambiguity but its especially exposed when it already imposes what it calls “Community Standards” and, for example, censors nude images in artworks on its platform. Thus the right to be somehow immune from the effects of purposeful and sometimes improper use of its technology to incite or malign becomes dangerous to defend.

Already this week large corporate business such as big advertising spender Verizon are pulling advertising from the platform, not just for a month, but are permanently pausing their activity until they say Faceboook ‘can create an acceptable solution that makes us comfortable". In 2019 Verizon was estimated to have spent $2.64 billion across all media (see Verizon advertising spend) so its likely it will have some impact. This comes alongside an already announced month long advertising pauses from Ben & Jerry’s USA, North Face and Patagonia.

While it’s clear this is not going to make a big dent in the $4.9b revenues it reported in the first quarter of this year, its brand and brand reputation are likely to face further damage until Zuckerberg starts to align the business closer to those of others in the tech sector like Twitter and Google who have made better effort.

The problem with Facebook is that its failure to stamp out racism and violent posts on the platform doesn’t equate with very principled brand values - “be bold; focus on impact; move fast; be open; and build social value”. As an enabler brand, it sees its role as a technology creator and facilitator and thus a distant hands-off role with any ill use of its technology (like most brands in the sector). All of this starts to sound both morally ambiguous and dangerous as it continues to allow comment and images that flout social norms. The fact is that Facebook, in enabling this kind of misusage of its technology, has by its very nature become a publisher and thus an arbiter of morality (and that is just another truth), whether it likes it or not. Its 28 pages of “Community Standards” not only proves its acceptance of this role but it also continues to sustain the continued precariousness of such an argument.

Even as last year’s Facebook rebrand seemed to resolve some structural issues around the role of the parent company, it failed to address the dissonance in its brand values and now it finds its revenue base wanting, as Verizon does, it to act more judiciously. On Friday 26 June Facebook reportedly acknowledged what it describes as “trust deficit” in a call to advertisers, its basic inaction might soon translate to action once some significant threats are made to its $70b annual ad revenues by larger corporates around the world. In the end its not something Zuckerberg can tough out forever.

On Friday 26 June Zuckerberg announced several steps Facebook would take to eliminate hateful content in ads, stamp out false claims leading to the 2020 US elections, and make progress on racial justice. This was after Facebook CocaCola and Starbucks joined Unilever in the social media boycott and Facebook's share price fell 7%. He added Facebook would hide or block content considered hateful or that could harm voting, with no exception for politicians, as Twitter has done. 

The Death of HBO: "The king is dead, long live the king"

One of the problems for the current spate of repositioning and rebranding by digital streaming companies or any broadcast company for that matter, is getting to grips with constantly shifting technology and the expectations of customers and audiences on what their brand should deliver.

Most strategists insist brands should be simple and simply expressed, as do most customers but not so the heads of WarnerMedia. Earlier this month it announced it would be retiring its HBO Go service and then subsequently launched its new all-you-can-eat app based streaming brand HBO Max.

Here’s how WarnerMedia put it: the HBO Now brand would be folded into the HBO app and current HBO Now subscribers would still be able to continue accessing HBO and also HBO Max through a rebranded HBO app on the same platforms they currently use to view HBO Now. The company said they had differentiated HBO Max and HBO, by noting that HBO Max is an app that includes all of HBO together but with additional WarnerMedia content offerings. So why isn’t it called Warners? The HBO app will be a standalone streaming platform for the HBO service. Get it? No.

The problem for me as that WarnerMedia is treating both HBO and HBO Max as separate brands which as they are presented they are not and for many customers, they can’t see why they are different. For the mot part their visual and name assets are shared but their offers are, by their own admission, differently positioned though HBO is inclusive of Max. Even in their press releases WarnerMedia says that all of HBO’s content will be available on HBO Max, so how is that not confusing?

So if HBO is the brand, why is HBO Max not being treated as a true sub-brand with a differentiated positioning, offer and audience or is looking for one? There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of thinking around updating each of the brand’s specific values and propositions. HBO has a lot of adult content, yet HBO Max is oriented towards family viewing but with parental controls of the adult content, much like Netflix. You get the picture or you do not.

It’s not particularly apparent what problem is being solved with the creation of this sub-brand. Wouldn’t WarnerMedia saved a whole lot of money and simplified it’s HBO brand platform by branding the entire offer HBO?

The next quarterly update on subscription numbers and value from WarnerMedia might provide some glimpse into what seems to be an apparent strategy fail.

Apple's brand strategy is stuck somewhere in 2011.

Ask anyone what they think Apple’s brand strategy is and you’ll mostly get an opinion that’s stuck somewhere between 1987–2011 and they really won’t be wrong. The reason — the brand strategy has barely moved on.

Gone are the days of Apple’s when dominant marketing savvy CEO in Steve Jobs who, alongside visionary designer Johnny Ive, could articulate a clear positioning via forward thinking human centred design. Current CEO Tim Cook’s Apple brand strategy appears MIA, uncentered and confused: what is it that Apple stands for these days — fun? humanity? simplicity? or as a friend described it, “reassuringly expensive”.

While Apple might be one of the world’s most valuable brands but this has been largely created on the back of a single product — the iPhone and by switching from product centredness to service led — Apple TV and Apple Music. Its reliance on what appears to be a legacy strategy has seen its brand positioning, particularly around design, largely abrogated to competitors like Google, Huawei and Samsung.

Just this week Apple released macOS Catalina, the new version of its standalone Mac operating system, which saw it dumping its nearly 20 year old iTunes sub-brand in favour of three branded apps: Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, and Apple TV. This at least makes some sense but there’s no longer any distinction between it’s app naming, its subscription service, its non-subscription music integration as well as its peripherals eg. Apple TV is both a service and device. And then there’s its Apple Match service.

Are we to assume that they are always going to be one and the same or will products and service delivery be a mash? Someone needs to get in there and give them decent nomenclature guidance.

And given all this, Apple no longer appears to have a head of brand. They haven’t had one since 2017 and perhaps that explains it.

Find out more in the latest edition of BRANDNEWs, a global newsletter to help you find out what brands are around the world are launching, who's failing and what brabd strategy is making an impact.

DIFFUSION launches BrandNews

DIFFUSION has just launched BRANDNEWs, a newsletter to help you find out what brands around the world are launching or have launched, who’s failing and what brand strategy is making an impact. 

BRANDNEWs is published weekly from 5 June 2020 and will provide category listings of newly launched and failing brands as well as some analysis about what brands are doing with their strategy.

The first 500 subscribers will get free access til end of June and thereafter there will be a small monthly or annual subscription charge via SubStack for all.

If you’re in marketing, branding, advertising, markets and research you’ll find BRANDNEWs indispensible.

Contributions are welcome.

Here’s some samples of what you might get:

BRANDNEW

Retail Fashion

1. Gauge81 was founded in 2019 is (pronounced GO-SH eighty-one) is an Amsterdam-based label that blurs the line between casual and evening wear. Gauge81
2. Kirin meaning giraffe in Korean) is a streetwear label founded by Korean DJ, fashion icon and designer Peggy Gou. The line first made its debut at Paris Fashion Week 2019.

BRANDFAIL

Passenger Car Rental and Hiring

Hertz USA, whose ownership also includes the Dollar and Thrifty brands, has filed for Chapter11 Bankruptcy protection. It blames the collapsing used car market in the US. 23 May 2020. Hertz

Retail Trade: Department Stores

Target/Kmart More than 160 Target stores in Australia are closing down and being rebranded as Kmart stores. 23 May 2020. Target to Kmart

BRANDstrategy

Tesla

The Tesla brand strategy is a minimalist futuristic green primarily automotive brand with a bare bones approach to marketing by founder and chairman Elon Musk using the marque as a platform for promotion including ferrying astronauts to for SpaceX, the world’s first private space flight on 1 June 2020 to a retail store that used to offer free rides in downtown Manhattan. Tesla has largely eschewed big budget advertising and focused instead on social media (Musk has 35 million personal followers), visual iconography via the (super)charging stations, distinctive livery and aural branding across the entire Tesla range. Even the launch of the Tesla Cybertruck in late 2019, despite controversy generated at the event, still didn’t dim the enthusiasm for the brand. Musk’s brand strategy is to build Tesla via a whole of brand approach, tying product development together with the green integrity of its electric battery to create a closed ecosphere around the brand.

When Every Thing Becomes Media.

“The message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure. ” (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, NY, 1964, p. 8)

What McLuhan writes about the railroad applies with equal validity to the media of print, television, computers and now to the Internet of Everything (IoE).  The forerunner of this was the Internet of Things (IoT), which Kevin Ashton described in a presentation to Proctor and Gamble in 1999:

If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things—using data they gathered without any help from us—we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost. We would know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling, and whether they were fresh or past their best.

In 2007 founding Wired editor Kevin Kelly went about paraphrasing some initial thoughts by Tim Berners-Lee, describing four stages of the communication evolution leading to the emergence of the  IoT.

In the first stage, Berners-Lee identified the linking of computers was the link-up the network of networks, or the internet. The second, he said was the linking up documents and pages or the web. Back then we were at the end of the beginning of the third stage, where data is unbundled and in a form that can be read by any device on the web or what Berners-Lee calls “the World Wide Database”. In the fourth stage, he foresaw a “drift towards linking up the things themselves. You want all the data about a thing to be embedded into the thing. What we ultimately want is an internet of things.”

But now that’s been co-opted  to become the Internet of Everything (IoE). In August Cisco seized on it, claiming naming rights, creating a hashtag and a dedicated domain but also telling anyone who wanted to hear that it will create $14.4 trillion in total value for private companies over 10 years.

Cisco defines IoE as bringing together people, process, data and things to make networked connections and as McLuhan had already rightly identified, with the ability for the technology to turn all that information into actions that create new capabilities, richer experience and opportunity in much the same way as the technologies of the railway, telegraph, sound and cinema did.

And they cite “Metcalfe’s law” courtesy of Robert Metcalfe, well-known technologist and 3Com founder, who described how the value of a network increases proportionately to the square of the number of users. It’s 1 + 1 = 3. Then mash it with Intel co-founder Gordon Moore’s Law and the explosive power of the idea is even more greatly magnified.

In that analysis Cisco say that by 2015 as many as 15 billion devices will be connected, with a forecast 50 billion by 2050. When these machines, this media interact with each other, trading data with little intervention and without our knowledge, it might be safe to say, the IoE will be here.

But my IoE looks like this: computers, handhelds, an IP-enabled desk phone, smartphones and maybe my car but it’s on board computer isn’t connected except at the shop. Oh and then there’s Peter, my local delivery guy, he has a handheld scanner which I try and scribble on. I’m sure that’s connected. Yes, there are chips in some of my credit cards but from where I am right now this is still very much early stage in Ashton and Berners-Lee’s Internet of Things or even Cisco's IoE.

And as a strategist, many of my clients can barely deal with the data they have available now, if they even have it. Yet, the Internet of Everything is going to arrive and they’ll still be trying to deal with stage 3 of Berners-Lee’s communication evolution. More so, we are yet to see how the IoE this will pan out for consumer control where, for the most part, those connected things will be delivering data back to origin points determined by the media creators and not by the users. When this happens, marketing may well become an arm of technology and analytics and their application overlayed by neuro-scientific and behavioral-based brand insight and thinking, media will be everything and it will truly begin to transform our lives.   

Gap And MySpace re:brands in crisis.

One of the problems of rebranding led by high profile logo redesign is that it can expose the  lack of thorough consideration of what the process itself is designed to achieve.

It now seems Gap and now MySpace have fallen victim to the inevitable focus on the pretty picture, rather than the big picture.

While no one would necessarily argue that either companies are suffering. Gap has annual sales of US$9.12b and MySpace is still the world's second largest social network with more than 50m users. However, both have significant brand problems which no logo redesign is going to solve, even if the claim is that this is only one part of a more r/evolutionary path.

In Gap's case, the brand has been struggling with frumpy perception issues for years as its core product has come under threat from more highly attuned brands like HandM, Uniqlo and Zara. It hasn't been helped by falling sales. Same-store revenue at Gap stores fell 1% in September but it wasn't as bad as the 8% drop in 2009.

MySpace has also been similarly blighted. Global revenues are expected to fall by 21% this year, under News ownership its suffered from constant management flux, a falling headcount and Qantcast estimates US visitors are leaving in droves with numbers down by 10m between April and September.

And obviously Gap didn't see anything worth learning from Kraft Australia's painful debacle last year when it crowdsourced its new iSnack 2.0 as the new name for an extension of its popular Vegemite brand. Despite the use of a highly anonymous panel of "brand experts" to vet the process (I suspect they were all internal), the result was a resounding public relations thud and a frank mea culpa from Kraft that 48000 submissions later, the name was axed. Gap pretty much followed the same sad route.

The lesson: unrestrained crowd sourcing of an extremely popular and well known brand is inevitable folly. More so, don't focus on the tactical.

Perhaps Gap recognised this when it posted on its Facebook page what could only be regarded as the beginning of a reversal: “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.”

Gap North America president Marka Hansen later engaged in further dissembling on Huffington Post claiming that the rebrand came from a desire "to see how our logo - one that we've had for more than 20 years - should evolve. Our brand and our clothes are changing and rethinking our logo is part of aligning with that.

"We want our customers to take notice of Gap and see what it stands for today. We chose this design as it's more contemporary and current. It honors our heritage through the blue box while still taking it forward, " she said.

While Hansen said Gap was "listening" and would continue to take customers on the "journey" and consider their design submissions, the damage to the brand and reputation is already irreversible. Even more laughable now that the new logo has been dumped.

Put simply, Gap recognised there was a problem with the old logo and claims it's doing something about product and stores, but a brand is the sum of all parts. Hansen as a senior executive should know better, Gap needs radical brand reinvention not revitalisation. If Gap has been in a three year turnaround, as Hansen claims, where's the resulting sales? The brand tracker? And more importantly, what's the strategy? It really needs to start with some clarity of brand vision bought out of deeper customer insight as well as a braver sense of brand stewardship. All of which might have gone AWOL at Gap, a fact clearly exposed last week and confirmed when it announced plans to dump the new logo as quickly as it showed it to Facebook.

One would hope MySpace management has been watching Gap's PR tsunami and sees something to learn. It's new logo is not even launched yet. But the conversation has started, MySpace might want to rethink its already creaking credibility.