Fast Fashion Clothing Brand GAP: Always For Individuality.

According to the world clothing and shoe net reporter, when Gap wants to attract all customers to patronize its shop -- its dress is not age group, the shop's fashionable decoration is less. The usher at the shop door smiles and greets everyone. Abercrombie & Fitch has publicly presented "hostility" to customers over 30 years old.

Not only that, Abercrombie & Fitch also drives their customers over 30 years old with their greatest ability: the employees play loud electronic music in the shop, which is not conducive to people's concentration and thinking, and put dark colored curtains on the windows to avoid the middle-aged and old customers who do not want to receive them. If there are still some middle-aged and old customers who are not aware of this suggestion, they will arrange some fashionable young employees to hang around the shop door to disperse them.

Unfortunately for Gap executives,

Young people who follow the trend rush out of Gap and rush into the fashionable clothing store -- Abercrombie & Fitch and J.Crew for teenagers, and AA for young people aged more than 20.

(AmericanApparel) and H & M -- they have delineated the very precise user groups, so they successfully lock in young target customers in one hit.

Finally, these dress brands were warmly welcomed.

The number of young people in the United States has been increasing year by year since 1992. People feel that the population will continue to grow to 2010, or even longer.

Thanks to those parents who love their children, because the consumption of this age group is also increasing at an alarming rate.

Gap executives decided to follow the trend.

In order to attract volatile youngsters to go back to their stores, they began to make short blouses and bright pink trousers, including hoodies and tight sweaters, mini skirts and doll dress.

They hired Messi Grey, a cool R&B singer, to launch a publicity campaign, to introduce leather pants production lines, and even play the music of teasing customers in some shops.

But the result is disastrous.

Perhaps through the pformation of Gap's sense of shame, young people are still spending on shops such as Abercrombie & Fitch, etc.

To make matters worse, loyal customers over the age of 35 seem to be offended by the new marketing method of Gap, and turn to a more expensive or more expensive shop or shop for their age clothes.

Gap executives are very puzzled. According to their past experience, the trend has always been consistent with their assumptions.

The first Gap shop opened during the 1969 anti cultural rebellion in California - the inspiration for Gap came from the generation gap between rebellious young hippy and old-fashioned parents.

Casual and simple jeans, casual clothes everyone can wear - Gap brand has built a bridge between the two generations.

In the next few decades, the business took advantage of the casual clothes that everyone liked. The store had everything for everyone: young people buy T-Shirts, old ladies buy Sweaters, everyone buys khaki pants.

For a long time, it was successful.

In 1982, Gap founded its own brand (before it sold Levi's jeans mainly); in 1983, it bought the Banana Republic (Banana Republic) clothing; in the days after that, it expanded to Asia and Europe, and launched the children's clothing brand Gap Kids and Baby Gap; it also launched a cheaper clothing store Old Navy (Old Navy).

Gap tried to please all the people, but the result was unsatisfactory.

In the late 1990s, Gap became the largest clothing retailer in the world, with more than 3000 chain stores of its three leading brands, Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy.

Its clothes are suitable for everyone, from fashion magazine's model to actress Shharon Stone.

In 1996, Shharon Stone appeared on the red carpet in a charcoal grey turtleneck sweater. She told reporters that the dress came from Gap.

This made Gap executives happy for a while.

It was also during that time that Gap became the pronoun of office casual clothes.

It's like a new uniform supplier - twill pants and bland T shirts that make everyone look the same.

But suddenly no one was willing to wear a uniform.

Just a few years ago, Gap attracted young people and their parents, but neither side came to Gap now. These two generations no longer meet in the same store.

In the summer of 2002,

The executives found that catered to these fashionable young people not only drove the old loyal customers away, but also did nothing in the young group.

"We know we are divorced from young people," Kyle Andrew, vice president of marketing at Gap, told the women's wear times. "But we want to follow those who know us and love us."

This is the company's recent apology for middle-aged and elderly customers.

At the same time, Gap has launched a lightning advertising campaign, intended to pull the middle-aged and elderly customers back.

Under the slogan of "Gap for every generation", Gap has launched a new spokesperson -- a dazzling cross era musician and celebrities who dance and laugh in bright music; old country singer and composer Wiley Nelson is standing with young singer Ryan Adams; Gina Gina and Salma Hayek are in the same group; J Bacsik and Natalie Ambolia are in a group.

These are still not working.

Sales of Gap continued to decline. By the end of 2002, its performance has been declining for 29 months, the worst in history.

"Gap's target customers are hard to be captured," said a retail analyst. "Gap's target customers are everyone. If you are satisfied with all people, then you are nothing."

Gap has been abandoned by the vast middle market because it first turned to the young market, and when it admitted that it was wrong and tried to pull back to the middle market, it found that there was no middle market.

This is a story that can not be "one size fits all". It is a story that tries to satisfy everyone but eventually loses everyone.

In the past decades, the lost middle market has its roots in social change, but recently it has become the most important social phenomenon in our era.

Different intermediate markets have withered at different speeds in our lives.

Its disappearance has been a colourful color to our actions. From the way we define ourselves to what we buy, from the TV programs we read to the newspapers we read, from the news we get from politicians to the way we find our partners, the market has already formed a new and strange field. Everyone wants to be different and everything is small.

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

Social scientists tend to consider us human beings as the top organisms of food chains, and all things round; ecologists, on the other side, prefer to think of us as a group of people in a big background. In a network ecosystem with no tolerance, different creatures gather and dense, but no creature can control everything.

There is a man named Charles Darwin, the father of modern ecology.

In the origin of species, Darwin is the first person to regard plant and animal life as one of the same races as humans.

Through studying the characteristics of different ethnic groups for a long time, Darwin put forward the view of "natural law" and "survival of the fittest".

In order to track these ethnic groups, ecologists need to understand every branch and niche of the ethnic group.

The niche of a species refers to the position of a population in the time and space of the ecosystem and its functional relationship with the related population.

To determine whether a species branch is adaptable to its surroundings depends on what they eat and what they eat, and needs to regard their place of life and their actions as an integrated system.

In the past 10 years, we have been thrown into a system that looks like ecosystems.

In the past, our consumption was tightly controlled by a few business tycoons.

We are the customers caught by them; they know what we are, and our taste seems to be seen through them, so they give us the same things.

Now, however, business tycoons are forced to enter a new environment with different species, and each species wants something different.

Think about what happened to Gap.

For decades, it has been as stable as a 800 pound gorilla. By 2000, it had entered an unexpected abyss.

Gap has been stumbling in the new environment, and now it is because it lacks a clear niche customer positioning.

Business tycoons are important because they have pulled the reins of mainstream culture.

However, I think the mainstream culture only means that the culture prevailed at that time. It was the product of the control of a few business tycoons in the middle of twentieth Century.

In its heyday, it is a dynamic force changing and powerful enough to sweep away everything.

Most importantly, it opened up the middle market that suited us.

However, in the following decades, the middle market quickly disappeared, and the giants were hit hard and never recovered.

On the one hand, business tycoons are not big enough to control the whole ecosystem. On the other hand, they are not enough humility or full attention to understand customer needs in their field.

Like Gap, it has fallen into the middle market: no one really likes it though it is well known to everyone.

Such a business tycoon has made every effort to adapt itself to the new environment and has fought fiercely. For example, some giants want to keep their products suitable for all people to expand themselves; some giants employ "hunting the cool race" to let these "hunting cruel" use fire weapons and clever traps to locate and customary customers' habits; more adventurous, they derive inspiration from underground artists and pursue subculture consumption in the traditional sense of the mainstream culture.

So far, the results have been good or bad.

But at least one thing is clear: in order to meet the different needs of customers and subdivide these customers into different types, the research results are not always accurate, and this way is not as effective as the practitioners say, and it also makes the middle market look less attractive.

It turns out that the larger the ecosystem is, the more likely it is to increase new species, including diversification.

Plants and thriving animals

Frankly speaking, when Gap just started struggling for losing the middle market in 2000, I was hired by a business tycoon to work for it.

Not only that, I am also one of the trend researchers who have been dispatched by New York company to help him find a windfall.

Like many people, I enter these business giants to help them better understand their customers.

My title is "futuristic researcher", but this is only a small part of my duties.

More often, I need to dig out customer data in a different way to predict their behavior in the near future.

As everyone knows,

They certainly need someone like me.

They no longer know their customers.

Their behavior is like a naturalist. When naturalists encounter this situation, they usually place objects under a microscope, observe their characteristics more carefully, determine their species and their subspecies, and formulate their next plans.

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

When our environment becomes more diverse, the next topic is our diet.

Our new life is full of exotic details. We gather to find these details.

The new environment provides us with different things that big companies can offer us, but obviously the new environment is much better. In private clubs, many people are proud to define themselves as people who are outside the mainstream.

In one way or another, we got together again.

To survive in the new situation, you should not only adapt to the environment, but also become the most suitable living creature.

More importantly, it depends on what you want to find and feel strongly about and develop it.

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