I don’t think so. I think its PR gurus headed off to a retreat to work out how to generate free publicity with the minimum of effort, downed a few double-strength lattés and gazed at the blue sky. And someone came up with a quite ingenious solution.

“Hey Lazarus,” said Destiny (she’s bound to be called Destiny), “why don’t we create a fake logo.”

“But, dear heart, for why?” (He’s bound to talk like a fool. I mean, just look at his name.)

“Everyone on the internet will hate it, beg that we go back to the old one, and we can then release a deeply apologetic press release with words like ‘iconic’ to describe the old logo.”

“Yeah, and ‘passionate’. I think I love you Destiny.”

Step 1: Gap quietly puts up new logo on its website, prompting the Huffington Post to quickly post a poll asking  its readers if it’s “awesome” or “terrible” (roughly 8 out of 9 say terrible).

Step 2: Comments abound on Gap’s Facebook page.

Step 3: Twitter account appears to protest against new logo.

Step 4: “Viral” site launched so people can create their own logo.

Step 5: Marka Hansen, president of Gap in North America, uses The Huffington Post to write a fluffy blog about the new logo in response to the criticism.

And so to today’s press release:

“Since we rolled out an updated version of our logo last week on our website, we’ve seen an outpouring of comments from customers and the online community in support of the iconic blue box logo,” reads a statement from Hansen.

“Last week, we moved to address the feedback and began exploring how we could tap into all of the passion. Ultimately, we’ve learned just how much energy there is around our brand. All roads were leading us back to the blue box, so we’ve made the decision not to use the new logo on gap.com any further.”

You want more? Sure you can take it? All right then:

“At Gap brand, our customers have always come first. We’ve been listening to and watching all of the comments this past week. We heard them say over and over again they are passionate about our blue box logo, and they want it back. So we’ve made the decision to do just that – we will bring it back across all channels.”

And, great news, they’re going to turn the icon red over the holiday season! It’s almost – almost – as if all this was pre-planned.

Just in case you think I’m being overly cynical, allow me to point out one further thing. Whilst this is going on, Gap is literally courting controversy by suing Gapnote for its shocking decision to include the word “gap” in its name.

Of course it could be coincidence; it could really be that Gap thought a logo in a basic font with a floating blue box behind it was the right image for the new millennium; and, equally, Liverpool could win the Premiership this season.

As you can see, across various tests the red bar is three, four, even six times as tall as the green one. But hold on — because that’s not an accurate reflection of relative performance.

You’ve probably already spotted the reason why: the Y axis doesn’t start at zero! Instead, it originates at a rather arbitrary 0.8, greatly exaggerating the difference in scale between the green and red bars. A more neutral representation of the same figures would see the red team still win, but by a decidedly less jaw-dropping margin:

Of course, skipping over part of an axis can sometimes be justified. If you’re charting small changes in large numbers, it makes sense to zoom in a little, just for the sake of clarity. But here the graph isn’t intended to illustrate a trend: it’s supposed to convey, at a glance, just how much bigger one set of numbers is than another. And that’s precisely what it doesn’t do.

Don’t think I’m picking on any one company here: this type of spin is part and parcel of marketing, in the IT business and beyond. And to be honest, I rather enjoy the mental work-out of decoding official PR messages to get to the truth. It just irks me that they think we’re that gullible.

What’s the most shameless marketing claim you’ve come across?

I’m all for innovative marketing, but I think Toshiba’s hard disk team may have gone a little mad. Head over to www.harddiskdriverevolution.com and you can play a game all about – well, it’s obvious really – saving the world through the medium of hard disks.

You play an everyday IT support person who receives an email from the head of the secret service. You’re then thrust into a cupboard with a foxy lady complete with jumpsuit, who accompanies you through a devilish maze of exciting escapades. You shoot people! You crack a safe! You discover all about the latest industrial grade Toshiba hard disk!

I suppose it must work to a certain extent. After all, I’m giving it publicity here. But is this really the way to get the attention of time-poor IT professionals?

Perhaps the most blatant Buzzword Bingo press release that came to my attention of late can be found in all its glory here.

To save you the pain of having to read through all of it, here are my favourite extracts:

“a universal profile service for the social web that engages communities and enables content discovery”

“a provider of semantic intelligence solutions”

“thought leaders emerge”

“increasing their social capital”

“more closely emulate how communities flourish on the long tail”

BINGO!