Brand Audit for Gap

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Distribution

Gap has total 1359 physical stores all around the world. In addition, Gap also allows consumers to purchase their products through online platform such as Gap official websites, which makes purchases become easier and convenient for consumers. Besides that, Gap provides worldwide shipping for 114 countries which comes with free shipping (GAP, 2017).

Advertising

Gap is one of the big spender on advertising campaigns which includes TV advertising campaigns and print campaigns. Gap has spent 164 million US dollars in measured media advertising in the United States in 2015 and 2016 (N.A, 2017). One of the biggest company expenditure is for TV advertising. Since the late 90’s, Gap came up several TV advertisers such as 1999 Gap famously featured celebrities wearing Gap Jeans including Rapper LL Cool J (Susanna Kim, 2015). Other than that, the most iconic Gap ad was 1999 khakis ad campaigns which still live in the mind of consumers who live in the era.

Brand Exploratory

Consumer knowledge

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Consumer Knowledge

Gap was initially focused its target market on men and women within the age group from seventeen to twenty-five years old who are in the middle or upper class. However, after experiencing the sales and profits declines, Gap decided to change its focus to a new category of customers (Research Methodology, 2016). The new customers are the shoppers who look for simple yet stylish clothing with good-quality and moderate prices. Gap uses odd pricing strategy to attract sale shoppers who look for great deal. By applying this pricing strategy, it has drastically increased the sales and revenue. Consumers believe that the price of the item at an odd price would be lesser than the price at an even price.

A qualitative research has been conducted using various different approaches. Firstly, a focus group has been conducted to study the purchase behaviours of University of Richmond students and faculty. Some of the respondents stated that they will not spend time looking at the emails. In fact, they usually notice the sales advertisement through social media or a commercial. Some of the responses were about the difficulties to identify constant sales with seasonal sales as they received a number of sales advertisement from different brands which caused them to overlook the emails. According to the responses collected from the research, it has shown that most of the customers will check the sales advertisement through social media, such as Facebook and Twitter. Hence, Gap decided to go for social media and promotional campaign marketing strategy.

In addition, a quantitative research has also been conducted based on gender distribution, percentage of shopping alone or with group, demographic and the amount of customers actually made purchases in the physical store. Data collected from gender distribution shown that 60% of the Gap’s customer are female during non-sales hours and are even higher during sales hours, which is 80%. The percentage of customers shopping alone are more during non-sales hours while customers tend to shop in a group during sales hours. Moreover, data from ethnicity shown that there is an increasing number of Asian and African customers during sales hours. Data from social class shown Gap’s regular customers are mainly upper lower class during sales house while middle class customers shop during non-sales hours. Furthermore, shoppers within the age group from eighteen to twenty-five or twenty-five to thirty-five years old shop during non-sales hours. Lastly, the amount of purchases made during sales hours were varying from the range of 1 to 4 or more than 5 (Sarah Carroll & Yoko Chan, 2014).

Brand resonance

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The Gap brand resonance model pyramid has a great combined effect between the left-hand and right-hand sides of the pyramid. The emotional and practical benefits Gap attempts to deliver are consistent with customers’ imagery and feelings towards the brand. Also, the pyramid is strong from the bottom to the top, enjoying the high repeat purchase rates and having large quantity of regular customers. Gap has successfully focused on both high-quality product and the imagery associated with wearing and using Gap.

Competitive analysis

The fashion industry is an industry that known for the fierce competition, innovation and fast pace. Being part of the fashion industry, Gap aims for targeting customers that belongs to middle class and upper class, prioritize products quality and lead a luxury life. There are numbers of firms like Mango, Zara, Uniqlo, and Forever 21 are close competitors to Gap. Although the competition in fashion industry is hard, Gap manages to occupy a market share in the industry.

Zara. Zara is one of the largest leading fashion companies that provides clothes for women, men and children along with accessories products. Zara belongs to the Inditex Group, which is the largest fashion group in the world, who also owns Pull & Bear, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Stradivarius, Oysho, Zara Home, Lefties and Uterque. Currently, Zara is brand that values $10.1 billion, named the 51st most valuable company in the world. Zara is strongly believes in fast fashion hence it has a team of designers who are highly creative. Its strategy is to get as close as possible to luxury brands but comes at a lower price (N.A, 2012)

H&M. H&M is one of the world leading fashion brand that provides fashion clothing and accessories for women, men and children. It belongs to H&M group which is founded in 1947 and owns others fashion brands like H&M Home, COS, & Other Stories, Monki, Weekday Cheap Monday and ARKET. H&M has been listed on Global 500 since 2015 (N.A, 2017). H&M is a brand that comes with quality products but with a lower price for it. ‘Lower price comes with a better quality’, this is the strategy that H&M applied. H&M