Last week Gap unveiled a new logo on its Web properties, including its Facebook page. This move immediately unleashed a fury of traffic and comments on Facebook, Twitter, and design blogs, with sentiment ranging from “hideous” to “who cares?” In reaction to the momentum behind the negative comments, it didn’t take long for Gap to backpedal, first by trying to hold a competition to crowdsource a new logo. This drew even more ire from the design community, and — as my colleague Doug Williams writes — was exactly the wrong way to go about a crowdsourcing project. So, at the end of the day, Gap scrapped it all and restored its old logo to its Facebook page, its eCommerce site, etc.

This is a fascinating story on so many levels, and overall it demonstrates some serious misjudgment of how the logo and Gap’s strategy for rolling it out would be received by the company’s followers and the social media world in general. As a market researcher, I’d be interested to understand what research the company did before the launch on October sixth. I have two assumptions here:

• Gap didn’t do much customer research to inform its decision, and it wasn’t very confident in any research it did carry out. Did the company take the time to build a keen understanding of the particular kind of Gap customer it was targeting with this rebranding?