Gap was never uncool. It just disappeared for a while. CEO Richard Dickson explains how he’s bringing it back, using the same pop culture playbook he used to resurrect Barbie at Mattel. He breaks down why he tracks “brand love” metrics on a dashboard hourly, why Sydney Sweeney’s viral jeans ad was actually good news for the whole industry, and why the biggest risk a brand can take is playing it safe.
This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
You went to Gap when it was in a bit of a lull. Do you like the turnaround challenge of taking an iconic brand somewhere else? Is that your jam?
It seems I like that pain. Actually, it’s true. I love iconic brands that had a breakthrough and then, over their lifespan, had peaks and pits. I think Barbie is a great example of that. There are others, and certainly the Gap story is one of them as well.
Do you think about it as renovation? Do you think about it as restarting, refounding?
I think about it as revitalization. To the extent that you have to study a brand’s history, it’s about understanding what made it great to begin with. Why was it interesting? Why were people interested?
To find that core again?
Yeah, to find the essence, the breakthrough that inspired such success. Along the way, with brands I’ve been a part of, they’re generational. They go through trials and tribulations and a lot of outside influences that change the brand. But ultimately, at some point, those brands either lose their way or reinvent themselves to be relevant. . . . What I find interesting [is] getting involved in brands that arguably have lost their way and need to find that revitalized narrative to be relevant again. For me, my experience in doing that has a methodology, but it’s really the execution of that methodology that determines success.
So far, the success has been strong. You’ve had nine quarters of positive sales, right? Market value is up to $8.5 billion. And the driver you’ve pointed to connecting all this is pop culture, which for a lot of businesspeople seems kind of soft.
Yeah. I think pop culture sounds simple, but it’s hard. Moving at the speed of culture, staying relevant, particularly for brands that have history, is difficult. In the context of brands with history, these brands started when it was TV and print and outdoor. Being where your consumer is today means being everywhere. That’s very difficult to do. Ultimately, staying relevant is a sport. When you get it right, relevance can drive revenue.
When you only concentrate on numbers and deliverables, a brand can lose its way because you start to make decisions that are financially based, not necessarily narrative- or brand-based. That’s when you start to potentially fragment the dialogue with consumers because you’re driving a commercial proposition, but not necessarily one that really drives consumer authenticity.
That emotion.
That emotion. Brands are relationships, purely. It doesn’t matter what category they’re in, you have a relationship with a brand. When that brand fragments that in any way, you lose trust. And trust is the foundation of any brand relationship. Once that’s fractured, it takes a long time to regain it. At some point, we lost the storytelling and became more about the stuff.
Some CEOs get obsessed with watching the stock price all the time, even though few like to admit it. But you’ve said you look at a different metric hourly. I don’t know if this is right: a dashboard called Brand Love?
I do. Where’d you get that from? Yeah, I guess I do.
It sounds a bit distracting, though, looking that often. It sounds like when I get lost in my TikTok feeds.
It can be. But I find, first of all, retail is detail, and you’re in it every hour. We have a flash we can look at and say, “How are we doing?” And when we’re doing well, you should ask, “Why are we doing so well?” And when we’re not doing well, you ask, “Why are we not doing well?”
So these are sales numbers?
Well, there are sales metrics. I have a dashboard in my office that has graphs and sales metrics. And then there’s another dashboard that measures Brand Love, Brand Search, and attributes we’re measuring with our consumers in the context of receptivity to our narratives and to our media mix models.
And you’re tracking this every day, all the time?
We’re tracking it every day, all the time.
And it’s not distracting, it’s guiding?
I believe it’s the information you need to drive the business. And if you’re not curious about the work and what’s working or not working, this is not a business for you. It really isn’t.
And you see it that fast?
We see it that fast.
Which is new in the way, I guess, both the speed of culture and the speed of business work.
Absolutely. You can see it as soon as it hits the marketplace. Even some of our Gap work, our Katseye campaign, was trending No. 1 on TikTok within 24 hours. If we had said three years ago, “Do you think Gap brand is going to be trending on TikTok, let alone trending No. 1 in search?” no one would have believed that.
But with the data we receive, we can find multiple ways of sharing more storytelling, expanding that concept, and being motivated by the insights we’re gathering on a daily basis, which moves the organization forward. We see that with what sells, too. You see when a product sells, and you see when it doesn’t.
Every day you’re getting information that says, “This is going well,” and you’re getting information that says, “This is going badly.”
Totally.
And how do you know what the balance is when it’s going through that? Or do you just decide, “I’m going to be optimistic and emphasize the things that are going well?”
I’m a consummate optimist, and I love the challenge. If we get bad news or something doesn’t work, it’s a process of editing. That didn’t work. We’ve got to figure out what does. You don’t let it get you down. You let it inspire the next sort of breakthrough.
Sometimes you’re ahead of the game. Sometimes we might’ve been too far ahead, and it was a good idea, strategically well-intended, but flawed in terms of timing. Or strategically well-intended and flawed in execution. And in some cases, there’s dialogue, and a lot of companies have this: “Well, we tried that. We tried that. We tried that.”
Yes.
It’s not that it wasn’t the right thing to try, but for whatever reason the execution or the timing was off. Try again. And when you do hit it, that team play and that cultural spark can drive incredible momentum into a business.
Well, on the flip side, when people are saying, “We tried that, we tried that,” you stop trying anything.
Exactly right. And that’s when the business really stalls. It’s deer in the headlights. You don’t try anything, and you become incredibly safe.
Yes.
And arguably, that is to some extent what happened to Gap and our brands. We got spooked by some of the swings and ultimately became very safe, and therefore not very interesting. To get people interested, you have to be interesting. And that is ultimately what I think is connecting our consumers back to our brands: We’re interesting.
And so even the Sydney Sweeney stuff that was a little controversial, that’s okay?
I think it’s great for the industry. We’re in an industry where, obviously, we want to be the winners, but when the industry is driving creativity, it should inspire better competition. When you look left and you look right and you go, “Well, that’s pretty good, and they’re out there doing that,” you go, “Okay, let’s go.”
So I think we’re inspiring better work in the industry, and I think the industry is doing better work on its own. I think it moves us as an industry forward. And obviously, our goals and ambitions are to be the best of the best, but we’ve got a long way to go before we can claim that.
