I smell a PR stunt

Having stirred social media up over the past week with a much-hated new logo, Gap is right back where it started—announcing last night that it's ditching the new mark and returning to the old one.

Gap North America president Marka Hansen says in a statement: "Ultimately, we've learned just how much energy there is around our brand. All roads were leading us back to the blue box, so we've made the decision not to use the new logo on gap.com any further. At Gap brand, our customers have always come first. We've been listening to and watching all of the comments this past week. We heard them say over and over again they are passionate about our blue box logo, and they want it back. So we've made the decision to do just that—we will bring it back across all channels."

The language there is almost too perfect. Perhaps this about-face—and not the now-ditched crowdsourcing idea—is what Gap had planned from the beginning. You know—get people to talk about you for a week, admit your "mistake" (in essence, underestimating how much people love you), and have the last laugh by appearing to listen to your customers and then giving them their precious logo back—a logo they never even knew they loved.

Source: Adfreak