Business Innovation 2005 reports on clothing retailer The Gap's efforts at revamping their strategy:

Gap is placing a big bet on a system-wide store makeover strategy, in the hopes that becoming "more like the neighborhood Starbucks" will make Gap a must-visit retail destination once again. That means dark wood floors in place of beige floors, new lighting arrangements, comfy couches in the store (to encourage shoppers to hang out), and handwritten chalkboards in all Gap stores (to give each store an individualized, personalized touch).

In other words, instead of coming up with a truly innovative strategy, the Gap management team decided that the only option was to mimic Starbucks and hope for the best.

The Starbucks route, if done properly, could work, in my opinion. A better bet would be to look at their customer base and see what they want. Gap customers are middle class customers, probably primarily Caucasian, looking for popular, mainstream clothes. How can Gap bring these customers more of what they want (affordable fashionability)? In my opinion the best strategy for Gap answers that question. Maybe the answer lies in redefining fashionability: what if Gap embraced some of the popular Internet business concepts, like user-generated media and designs? Discount personalization?

Featured Reports

• Web 2.0 and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy [1]
• Culture 2.0 [4]
• SEO 2.0 [5]
• Publishing 2.0 [7]
• Real Heroes [1]
• The Mythology of Web 2.0 [4]
• Psychological Warfare [6]
• Superhero Marketing [5]
• Inverse Universe [6]
• Platform Strategies [6]
• Unclassifiable [6]
• Searchonomics [7]
• Open Source Strategies [12]
• Google [42]
• On Innovation [124]
• My Mistakes [9]

• Yo, Peep This: RSS Feed