The Great Gap Rip-Off: How Gap “borrowed” Patagonia Fleece Distinctive Assets
As an good consumer of pop culture, I keep my social media roster deep with influencers across many facets of culture. This includes @kayyorkcity, formerly of Betches media and now social media manager at the Gap. Besides showcasing her Millennial-but-trying-to-be-Gen-Z antics, she also reps her employer in her social posts on a regular basis. Which I would too! (Gap is definitely making a turn around as being part of culture again, but that’s a different post.) She was sporting this lime green fleece which I was obsessed with! Neon colors, especially that bright florescent green…I’m sold!
Of course I needed to know where she got this sweet, sweet neon fleece of my outdoor lifestyle dreams, and at first glance it had all the markers of being an iconic Patagonia quarter-button fleece in an unexpected color way. A soft fleece pullover with four button snaps, a left side pocket flap with the Patagonia logo over it. But after closer examination of her Instagram story, I had to hold to pause since that logo did not look like the Patagonia logo, but a logo posing as it. Then I realized it’s an imposter!
To the undiscerning eye, this Gap fleece pullover could be easily mistaken for the higher-end Patagonia version, and Gap was not doing anything to hide that fact. Patagonia has already filed a lawsuit against Gap for copyright infringement, but here I’d like to lay out the marketing argument against Gap’s blatant theft of Patagonia’s distinctive brand assets to misdirect consumers.
What are distinctive brand assets?
A distinctive brand asset is a non-brand-name trigger for a brand name in category buyer memory. These brand “triggers” can be verbal, visual, or auditory: think McDonald’s instantly-recognisable Golden Arches, the Taco Bell bong of a bell mnemonic, or Nike’s deep association with the phrase “just do it”. Professor Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has led the way in shaping thinking around distinctive brand assets and their importance to driving brand salience. (Warc has a greater primer on distinctive brand assets for a deeper dive).
How Gap “Borrowed” Patagonia’s Distinctive Brand Assets
Distinctive brand assets can also extend to the design of a product — think how Tesla cars have a unique, stand-out design that is clearly that of Tesla, or Adidas and their three stripes that signify their brand and shoes and appareal. Patagonia’s fleece has multiple distinctive design elements that make the design distinctly Patagonia.
- The Patagonia Logo and Placement
Patagonia has a ownable rectangular logo that features black mountains with blue and pink sky and the Patagonia word mark, and placement on the top left edge of the left label pocket. Gap stirred up confusion with a similar logo design, coloration, and placement to that of Patagonia. Strike one.
- The Fleece Design
I’m not a fleece pull-over historian, but Snap-T design is iconic to Patagonia and is often imitated by others. It’s so iconic, in fact, when I first saw the Gap knock-off I thought it was Patagonia before I even noticed the logo.
Why this matters is brands’ use distinctive assets to create mental shortcuts to a brand connection, which in turn has a positive impact on marketing effectiveness. A recent study by Kantar Millward Brown, for instance, found brands with the strongest assets are on average 52% more ‘salient’ than their rivals — in other words, you see the iconic Snap-T fleece pullover design → must be Patagonia. Here, Gap is stealing that hard-earned equity to sell their discount version without any of the leg work.
