Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Bizmology

Bizmology

Is the music industry really dying?

Posted: 12 Oct 2010 11:23 AM PDT

The Economist‘s recent take suggests that business is doing quite well, thank you very much. Just look past the disaster of overall CD sales and you’ll get a better idea. 

So, how are these folks making money? In a nutshell: live concerts, re-releases, merchandise, media licensing, sponsorship and, to a lesser extent, streaming services. And just who is paying for all this? Well, older folks. People over 60 now spend more on albums in the UK than do teenagers, a development that is the polar opposite of how things were just eight years earlier.

It’s a fine piece worth reading by anyone even remotely intrigued by where the music business is headed. And if this article has anything to say on the matter, business is headed anywhere but the drain.

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Photo by Berto Garcia, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

Gap scraps new logo

Posted: 12 Oct 2010 08:47 AM PDT

A week after Gap rolled out an “updated version” of its classic blue box logo it took it back. Marka Hansen, president of Gap Brand North America, said in a press release yesterday (read here) that after listening to its customers and the vocal online community Gap was scrapping the redesigned logo.

The backlash on social media sites, including Twitter and Facebook, and in the fashion and technology blogs had become impossible for the retailer to ignore. Critics complained the new logo, which debuted on gap.com on October 4, was ugly and bland. An article in Advertising Age noted that the most common sentiment among Internet detractors was the new logo “looked like something a child created using a clip art gallery. ” Gap returned the original logo to the website today, after initially defending the change by saying it would roll it out in stores and advertising in November.

“We’ve learned a lot in this process. And we are clear that we did not go about this in the right way,” says Hansen.

So what exactly did Gap do wrong? First and foremost the new logo — featuring bold black type and a floating little blue box — was unattractive, some would even say UGLY. I suspect that if Gap’s new logo had been a hit then all the fuss — online and off — would have been a boon for the company.

Hansen says the company “missed the opportunity to engage with the online community.” Haven’t these people ever heard of focus groups? It’s hard to believe that in the Internet Age, a sophisticated retailer and marketer like Gap, would have made such a change without extensive testing — both on- and offline. My guess is that by rolling out the new logo online — before spending millions to print new shopping bags, store signs, labels, and the like — Gap was testing it. It just failed to get the result the company was hoping for.
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