American fast fashion apparel GAP: maverick

Everything started with noisy music. At some point in 1999, Gap clothing retailers in New York and San Francisco began to worry about the emergence of a rival – Abercrombie & Fitch, it The deafening electronic music is played in the store, which is a strategy they deliberately.

When Gap wants to attract all customers to visit its store - its clothing is regardless of age, the store is less trendy, the welcome clerk at the door of the store smiles to everyone, Abercrombie & Fitch has publicly expressed It is "hostile" to the customer group over 30 years old. Not only that, but Abercrombie & Fitch also drives its customers over the age of 30 with its greatest ability: employees play loud electronic music in the store, which is not conducive to people to concentrate on thinking, and to hang dark curtains on the window. In order to avoid middle-aged customers who do not want to receive; if there are some middle-aged and old customers who are not aware of this suggestion, then they will arrange some fashionable young employees to squat at the door of the store (to dispel them).

For Gap executives, unfortunate things happened. Young people following the trend swarmed out of Gap and squeezed into trendy clothing stores - Abercrombie & Fitch and J.Crew for teenagers, American Apparel and H for young people in their 20s. & M - They have already set a very accurate user base, so they hit the young target customers successfully. In the end, these apparel brands were warmly welcomed.

The number of American teenagers has increased year by year since 1992, and people feel that the population will continue to grow until 2010 or even longer. Thanks to those parents who love their children, because the consumption of this age group is also growing at an alarming rate.

Gap executives decided to follow the trend. In order to attract the fickle young people back to their stores, they began to produce short tops and bright pink trousers, hoodies and tight sweaters, mini skirts and doll dresses. They hired the cool R&B singer Messi Gray to launch a publicity campaign, introduced a leather pants production line, and even played teasing customers' music in some stores.

However, the results are disastrous.

Perhaps seeing the change of Gap's shamelessness, the youth are still spending in stores like Abercrombie & Fitch that focus only on the youth market. To make matters worse, the loyal customers over the age of 35 seem to be offended by Gap's new marketing methods, and they are more expensive or cheaper to sell only for stores of their age.

Gap executives are very confused, and according to their past experience, the trend has always been consistent with their vision.

The first Gap store opened during the anti-cultural turmoil in California in 1969 - the inspiration for the name Gap stems from the "generation gap" between rebellious hippie young people and old-fashioned parents. Casual simple jeans, casual clothes that everyone can wear - the Gap brand bridges the gap between two generations.

In the next few decades, the company is growing fast with the tide of casual clothes that everyone seems to like. Its store has something for everyone: young people buy T-shirts, old ladies buy sweaters, Everyone goes to buy khaki pants. It has been a success for a long time.

In 1982, Gap founded his own brand (previously, it mainly sold Levi's jeans); in 1983, it acquired the Banana Republic clothing; in the following days, it expanded to Asia and Europe, and Introduced the children's apparel brand - Gap Kids and Baby Gap; it also launched the cheaper clothing store Old Navy (old navy).

Gap tried to please everyone, but the results were not satisfactory.

In the late 1990s, Gap became the world's largest clothing retailer, with more than 3,000 chain stores under its three major brands, Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy. Its clothes are suitable for everyone, from the fashion magazine model to the female movie star Sharon Stone. In 1996, Sharon Stone appeared on the red carpet in a charcoal grey high-necked sweater. She told reporters that the dress came from Gap. This incident made the Gap executives happy for a while.

It was also during that time that Gap became synonymous with office casual clothes. It's like a new uniform supplier – twill pants and a flat T-shirt that makes everyone who looks at it look exactly the same. However, suddenly no one is willing to wear a uniform. Just a few years ago, Gap also attracted teenagers and their parents, but now neither side comes to Gap; the two generations will never meet in the same store.

In the summer of 2002, Gap executives discovered that they were catering to these fashionable young people, not only rushing away the older loyal customers, but also getting nothing in the younger group.

“We know that we are out of the youth,” said Kel Andrew, vice president of marketing at Gap, to the Women’s Times. “But we want to follow those who know us and like us.” This is the company recently. Expressed apologies for middle-aged and old customers. At the same time, Gap launched a lightning advertising campaign, which is intended to bring back middle-aged and old customers. Under the slogan “For each generation: Gap”, Gap has launched a new spokesperson – a dazzling array of musicians and celebrities across the ages, who jump and laugh in bright music; old country singers, composers Man Willy Nelson stands with young singer Ryan Adams; Gina Rowlands and Sharma Hayek are paired together; Sissy Besik and Natalie Ambelia are together A group. These still have not worked. Gap's sales continued to decline – its performance has been falling for 29 months by the end of 2002, the worst in history.

“Gap’s target customers are hard to be captured,” says a retail analyst. “Gap’s target customers are everyone. If you are satisfying everyone’s things, then you are nothing.” Gap has been widely The market abandoned because it first turned to the young market, and when it admitted the mistake and tried to pull back to the middle market, it found that there was no intermediate market.

This is a story that cannot be “one size fits all”. It is a story that tries to satisfy everyone but finally loses everyone.

Back in the decades, those intermediate markets that have been lost have their roots in social change, but recently it has become the most important social phenomenon of our time.

Different intermediate markets have withered at different speeds in our lives. Its disappearance has given us a colorful color, from the way we define ourselves to what we buy, from the TV show we watched to the newspaper we read, from the news of our self-government. By the way we look for our partner, the market has formed a new and strange field. Everyone wants to be different, and everything is niche.

The only way to understand this situation is to turn to ecology.

Social scientists tend to view our human beings as the apex of the food chain, and all things are arched; ecologists, on the other side, prefer to see us as a group in a larger context – in an all-encompassing network ecosystem, Different creatures gather and are dense, but no single creature can control everything. There is one person, the father of modern ecology, called Charles Darwin. In the origin of the species, Darwin was the first to see the life of plants and animals as one of the same ethnic groups as humans. Through long-term research on the characteristics of different ethnic groups, Darwin put forward the viewpoints of "natural law" and "survival of the fittest".

To track the study of these ethnic groups, ecologists need to understand each branch of the ethnic group and its niche. The niche of a species refers to the position of a population in the ecosystem, its position in time and space, and its functional relationship with related populations. Determining whether a branch of a species adapts to the surrounding environment depends on what they eat and what they eat, and they need to think of where they live and what they do as a whole system.

In the past 10 years, we have been thrown into a system that looks like an ecosystem. In the past, our consumption was tightly controlled by a few commercial giants. We are the customers we caught; they know what we are, our tastes seem to be seen through, so they give us the same things.

Now, however, the business giant is forced to enter a new environment that encompasses different species, each of which wants something different. Think about what happened to Gap. For decades, it has been as stable as an 800-pound gorilla, and by the year 2000 it has been planted in an unexpected abyss.

Gap stumbled in the new environment and became what it is now because it lacks a clear niche target customer positioning.

The reason why business giants are important is that they have pulled the reins of mainstream culture. However, I believe that mainstream culture only means that this culture prevailed at that time. It was the product of the mid-20th century, under the control of a few commercial giants. In its heyday, it was an ever-changing dynamic force that was powerful enough to sweep everything away. Most importantly, it opens up the middle market that suits us.

However, in the next few decades, the middle market quickly died, and the giants were hit hard and never recovered. On the one hand, business giants are not big enough to control the entire ecosystem. On the other hand, they are not sufficiently humble or fully focused on understanding the customer needs in their field. Like Gap, it has fallen into the middle market: although it is well known to everyone, no one really likes it.

Such commercial giants have tried their best to adapt to the new environment and have fought for it. For example, some giants want to maintain production of all products suitable for everyone, so as to expand themselves; some giants hire "hunting cool people" to make these "Hunting Cool" uses the "weapons" and clever "traps" of firepower to find and locate the habits of customers; more adventurous, get inspiration from underground artists, chasing the traditional sense of opposition to mainstream culture. Subculture consumption.

So far, the results have been mixed. But at least one thing is clear. The results of these customers are not always accurate in order to meet the different needs of customers. The results are not always accurate, and this approach is not always as good as its practitioners have said. At the same time, it also makes the middle market look less attractive.

It turns out that the larger the ecosystem, the more likely it is to thrive new species, including diverse plants and thriving animals.

To be frank, when Gap just started struggling to lose the middle market in 2000, I was hired by a business giant to work for it. Not only that, but I am also one of the trend researchers who have been dispatched by the New York company to help it find a windfall.

Like many people, I entered these business giants to help them better understand their customers. My job title is "Future Researcher", but this is only a small part of my responsibilities. More often, I need to mine customer data in different ways to predict their behavior in the near future. As everyone knows, business giants definitely need people like me. They no longer know their customers. They behave like naturalists, and naturalists often encounter this situation by placing the subject under a microscope, observing its characteristics more closely, determining its species and the subspecies it contains, and then formulating their next One step plan.

It turns out that the larger the ecosystem, the more likely it is to thrive new species, including diverse plants and thriving animals. As our environment becomes more diverse, the next topic is our diet. Our new life is filled with exotic details, and we gather together to find these details. The new environment provides us with something different from what big companies can offer us, but obviously the new environment is much better; in private clubs, many people define themselves as people outside the mainstream. feel proud. In one way or another, we got together again.

To survive in a new situation, you should not only adapt to the environment, but also be the most adaptable to the environment. More importantly, it depends on what you are looking for to give you a strong feeling and develop it.