The fiasco of the Cracker Barrel logo shows how difficult it is to refresh things without boring loyal customers
Good morning. Lila Maclellan here, filling Diane Brady. It is a dilemma that any CEO which has taken up a brand in difficulty but which can be appreciated can identify. How to refresh things without alienating loyal customers? We are talking, of course, of the frenzy around Cracker Barrel, which experienced a brutal reaction to its modernization push and in particular its new rationalized logo unveiled last week. Although the logo looked like the old – brown and yellow with the same old police force – he did not include a literal barrel and the elderly who had sat on a chair next to him during most of the 56 years of the company.
When I asked David Reibstein, Marketing professor at the Wharton School, for his point of view on fiasco, he gave the company and CEO Julie Felss Masino a mixed exam. The brands have no choice but to refresh and face the anger of the loyal customers who could feel unstable by the novelty, he therefore applauds the CEO for insisting that Cracker Barrel evolves.
After all, while Jake Bartlett, analyst at Trist Securities, underlines, the pedestrian traffic of restaurants has dropped for years, and that Masino, which joined in 2023, promised investors a great transformation which will be paying in 2027. “They need to broaden their demographic attraction”, he said, and make sure that they are capable of younger families and consumers. ”
To this end, the company had tested a range of updated and less congested interiors to a fraction of its stores and to speak to investors and customers of experiences for months. Masino also recently appeared on Hello America And addressed certain criticisms of the new look; Despite publications on social networks featuring customers calling bland and charming renovations, the CEO said most of the comments had been extremely positive. She also reassured the fans that the barrel of cracker of their childhood is always intact. “The soul of Cracker Barrel does not change,” she said. “The rocking chairs are still there. The chimney is there, the ankle game, all the things that make a barrel of Cracker, the barrel of Cracker.”
But with regard to the change of logo, the company said Little, and the market has filled white, making fun of the logo as boring. Some conservative activists have gone further, accusing the CEO of having abandoned the heritage of the brand on behalf of the “arrow”. This line of discussion degenerated to an absurd degree.
The heart of the problem may not be the logo at all. It is that, by reorganizing the image of the company, leadership did not communicate a vision of Cracker Barrel following chapter. “It would be good if Cracker Barrel would say:” Here is what we are defending now, “observed Reibstein, rather than” we have just changed part of the background of our name “.
This is something that the deceased graphic designer Paul Rand, who created the emblematic logo of IBM’s eye, “M”, knew too well. “A logo derives its meaning from the quality of the thing it symbolizes,” he wrote once, “not the other way around.” –Lilas Maclella
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Today’s edition of the CEO Daily was compiled and published by Joey Abrams and Nicholas Gordon.
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