write an article on Marketing Challenges in Old Navy. It needs to be at least 2000 words.

. Before I start talking about Old Navy as a brand, it is important for us to study the company that manufactures it. As mentioned above, Gap Inc. is the parent company of Old Navy. Gap opened its first store in San Francisco in the summer of 1969 and today, it has over 3100 stores and is one of the largest speciality retailers in the world (Gap Inc., 2008). The net sales of Gap Inc. decreased to $15.8 billion in 2007 from 15.9 billion. The net earnings in 2007 increased to $833 million (Gap Inc., 2008). Gap has always provided trendy yet reasonably priced clothes to its customers. As it holds, “Gap makes it easier to buy a pair of jeans”. It does this through its four operations: Banana Republic, Piper Lime, Gap and Old Navy.

For over a decade, (founded in 1994), Old Navy is known to make casual yet trendy apparel for women, men, girls, boys, baby girls and baby boys. It also makes shoes and accessories but we will overlook that, for our purpose. Old Navy focuses on the family. The target audience of Old Navy, however, is the trend-driven teenagers with a budget, a casual man, a mother who shops for the family. The clothing at Old Navy is more reasonable than all the other Gap subsidiaries. The most popular products at Old Navy are its tech vests and its fleece. It recently launched a ‘women’s plus’ line which is exclusively made as an online product (Gap, 2008). This was said to generate a significant volume of online sales for them. It also started a bath and body line, ONBody, which later slumped due to its failure with the customers.

As far as promotion is concerned, Old Navy has a special item on sale each week which is known as the ‘Item of the Week.’ (Gap Inc, 2008). It has much-talked-about advertising campaigns. They are rather different from the usual Gap campaigns. These ones focus more on the family.