Gap Finally Answered The Question My Students Couldn't

For years I have used the Gap in my brand lectures at business schools. I ask the same questions every semester. Strong brand? Everyone nods. What does it stand for? Silence. What do you expect when you walk into a Gap? Longer silence. What's different and relevant about it? Nothing.

 

That was the problem in four questions. Everybody knew Gap. Nobody knew what Gap was for.

 

For years, Gap's answer was the same playbook. Celebrities. Hip music. Slick cinematography. Edgy copy. And behind all of it, the same products, the same store design, the same online shopping experience. New faces on the outside, nothing new on the inside. Borrowed interest is a loan that always comes due. The stars kept changing. The brand never did.

 

Attention is not a brand strategy. It never was.

 

Then Gap stopped chasing and started digging

 

Look at what the turnaround is actually built on. No borrowed interest. No trying to capture the latest trend or manufacture buzz. No new logo. No trying to be something they are not.

 

Instead, Gap went back to what it always owned. Denim. Well-fitting basics. The optimism of classic American style. The logo hoodie a generation grew up wearing. The campaigns still have music and culture in them, but now they point at the product instead of covering for it. CMO Fabiola Torres, a Nike and Apple veteran, gets the credit for that discipline.

 

Culture is the delivery system. Denim is the message. The results are showing up where it counts: sustained positive comparable sales, quarter after quarter.

 

Marc Pritchard, P&G's longtime brand chief, has a favorite phrase for this, borrowed from brand strategist Joey Reiman: the fruits are in the roots. Your roots are the GPS for building your brand. Not a museum to visit. A navigation system to follow.

 

I'd add my own coordinates to that GPS. Simplicity. Strategic precision of focus. Delivered through brilliant execution. Pick the one thing you can own, strip away everything that dilutes it, then execute it better than anyone else. That's not nostalgia. That's discipline.

 

Levi's is running the same play

 

CEO Michelle Gass talks about the 501 the way Apple talks about the iPhone. It's the franchise that holds up the whole house. She sold off Dockers to double down on the core.

 

She's building a denim lifestyle business, but every extension starts from the same root, expanding who Levi's is “without losing the core of what we represent,” as she puts it. Evolve the expression. Never abandon the equity.

 

Even Pizza Hut has figured this out. While closing underperforming locations, franchisees are restoring the red roofs, red cups, and Tiffany-style lamps of the brand's glory years, and customers are lining up for the memory. Different category, same lesson. The answer wasn't out there in some trend. It was sitting in the roots the whole time.

 

The lesson for every brand chasing relevance

 

Notice what none of these brands did. No reinvention. No new name. No expensive makeover designed to look like everybody else. They didn't ask consumers what they wanted the brand to become. They focused on what consumers already believed the brand to be, then made it relevant again.

 

Here's the trap most struggling brands fall into. They confuse being old with acting old. Being old is an asset. Acting old is a liability. Telling them apart is the whole job. Gap's roots weren't the problem. Ignoring them was.

 

A brand becomes stronger when you narrow its focus. Gap and Levi's didn't find something new to say. They found what was always true and finally said it like they meant it.

 

Next semester, when I ask my students what Gap stands for, I think the class will finally have an answer. And the answer won't be a celebrity's name.

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Previously published in Forbes.