J.C. Penney Looks to Red Carpet to Rebrand... Again.

So it looks like J.C. Penney is hitting the red carpet again this year, with another "rebranding" strategy.  While last year's carpet was abuzz with Penney's new campaign focused on the "fashionable side" of JCP, this year's campaign is more subdued, simply unveiling a new logo...

[cue, screeching halt...]

Yes, another major brand is skating out onto the thin ice of logo regeneration.  The Gap's new logo (Left):

lasted barely a day, before consumer outcry via social media



led the company to revert back to the OLD logo (Right panel, above).  Gap joined the list of other brands - like Starbucks, and Comedy Central - that launched new logos to mixed reviews.

So, I was a bit surprised when I caught my first glimpse of Penney's new art (Right Panel):


Wait.  Did Penney's steal a page out of Gap's playbook?  Is it just me, or does the second "visual" look a lot like the Gap logo so hated by Gap customers?  Apparently our good friends on the internet make it easy to create your own "Gap" logo, and it kind of looks like Penney's took them up on this offer.

I'm not sure whether this "rebrand" will cause as much of a commotion as the Gap fiasco, which may be a good thing.  However, I am not sure this change is substantial enough to cause the splash that Penney's is looking for.   Apparently, the company is looking for is new "lowercaps" logo (that's right, the key difference here, if you didn't catch it, is that the new logo on the right (above) has dropped the JCP for jcp).  Earth shattering.

What really gets my goat is that brands continue to think that they can address and appeal to real shifts in consumer behavior within younger generations via surface aesthetics such as this.  Sure, Millenials are part of the "text generation" that eschew capitalization, but if brands think that they can woo them simply by "talking the talk" - all I can do is SMH.