Our Senior Designer, Paul Lukes, is back with a follow-up to his take on the Cracker Barrel rebrand, enjoy! — Bonfire Editorial Team
Barreling through a refreshed brand
Just when we thought we’d heard the end of the buzz around Cracker Barrel’s latest brand refresh, the company decided to revoke the new logo’s privileges and pull it from all public use. Last week, I shared my personal take on the rebrand/refresh. While I contended it wasn’t the most revolutionary design/branding work, it was by far an improvement on the dated and convoluted branding Cracker Barrel had been using up to that point. So, if the design was good, what went wrong and why did a certain sector of the public have such a visceral negative reaction to it?
Let’s first talk about who has been the primary Cracker Barrel customer over their history. The original owners started Cracker Barrel in 1969 in Lebanon, Tennessee—attempting to draw customers into one of their gas stations. The restaurants have traditionally been positioned near highways, making it easy for families on road trips to stop and get some home-cooked-ish meals on their travels. The chain was especially popular in the southeastern United States and attracted a clientele that viewed themselves also as “country.” A country store for a country clientele traveling across the country.
Behind-the-scenes work stayed behind the scenes
Fast forward to 2024. Cracker Barrel underwent rigorous reviews, tested new menu items, built strategies, and completed the many other steps that go into repositioning and rebranding a company of that size—even describing it all in an official announcement. So, the strategy and work that went into their decision started a LONG time before the rebrand was released. They did their homework and had good reasoning behind the decisions they made.
Some key points of their strategic revamp I think are worth pointing out are that they wanted to refine the brand, increase relevance, and ultimately grow profitability as a result. They recognized their aging audience and the need to adjust their branding and positioning to appeal to a younger demographic. No business wants their whole audience to die off with no one to take their place. Taking this all into consideration, I still think the updated branding and new look were spot on and well done. Everything was streamlined to work better in our digital-first world and objectively better in all aspects. The design work isn’t the issue, though.
Where I believe Cracker Barrel went wrong was in their rollout of the new brand and how it was presented to the public. They completely fumbled the launch by not actively engaging their current audience and taking them along for the ride. Most people only saw the before and after logos and assumed that was the extent of the rebrand, because there wasn’t more information easily available to them. The public by nature isn’t going to go dig for more information or more visuals to figure out what the full brand picture is in the same way a designer or creative director might. So, it’s the company’s job to make sure the new brand is delivered in a way that not only tells the full story but also invites the audience into being a part of that story. I can’t blame Cracker Barrel’s current audience for feeling alienated and abandoned, even if they haven’t been to an actual Cracker Barrel since Y2K was a real fear.
Position or be positioned
A better way to introduce the new brand would’ve been creating content leading up to the launch—rooted in each of the decisions and showing how they were inspired by the legacy of the brand. This would’ve avoided the feeling from customers that the company was forgetting their history. AirBnB did a fairly good job of this when they updated their logo. They put out a video talking about every small decision they made and the reasoning for it. And that was just the logo update. Cracker Barrel had a full brand with tons of collateral and environmental design elements to showcase and talk about. But they didn’t do any of this with the public in a way that was super accessible or purposeful.
The public isn’t going to read a four-page PDF for investors. They need to be shown why your new brand is better than the old one. This is what makes branding such a difficult and tricky practice, riding that fine line between ushering in the new while honoring the legacy in a way that feels meaningful. When you fail to put in the extra effort to present and position your new branding properly, the masses will position it for you. And in a social climate ripe with division, the politicians and pundits jumped at the chance to politicize this rebrand as “woke” and a variety of other things. I see this branding as apolitical, but that just shows the risks you run when you don’t actively engage in meaningful conversation and marketing practices with your core audience.
As a result of their passive “launch,” the Cracker Barrel brand was positioned by the public rather than the brand itself—and their stock plummeted. And if anything is true in business, it’s that the bottom line matters. The lesson here is that you only have ONE chance to launch your new brand. So handle it with utmost care and don’t forget the customers that brought you to where you are. Loyalty is probably one of the hardest things to build in marketing, and it shouldn’t be taken lightly.
Launching a rebrand 101
Some additional points to consider when taking a new brand public:
- Make sure your new or revised brand story is airtight and ties into your legacy brand in meaningful and tangible ways. The public will find holes, so make sure there aren’t any.
- Make sure your strategic foundation is as solid as can be and is based on real-life research. This will make your branding decisions bulletproof when tested against scrutiny. Strategy rules all.
- Plan your launch like it’s the birth of your first child. Consider timing, social climate, pros and cons, who the detractors and supporters will be, and whether you want to switch your brand over abruptly or in a slow, incremental transition (that might have been smarter for this brand).
- Make sure to bring your people along on the journey and honor the existing brand equity your company has. Your most loyal customers, employees, and partners of the brand should ideally be your biggest fans of the brand changes. Once you’ve won them over, that will prime you for the rest of your target market and new customers.
- Lastly, and absolutely most importantly, once you launch the brand, stick with it. This is the final piece and where Cracker Barrel went wrong, they crumbled to the social pressure even though the rebrand was strategically sound and objectively good design. Every rebrand is going to upset a good chunk of the population. That is unavoidable. Change is hard and a lot of people struggle with it. But eventually they come around. I think Cracker Barrel should’ve stuck with the new branding and continued to educate the public on where and how they included the brand heritage. It’s a little bit late, but going backwards is never the answer when you’ve done your due diligence with a rebrand.
The Cracker Barrel rebrand is a case study not just in design and marketing, but in branding as a tool for leading a company. Good branding requires chutzpa and the backbone to proceed even in the face of adversity and public backlash. When a brand flip flops as they have done, it just tells us their brand story was flimsy to begin with. At the end of the day, not all publicity is good publicity.
