Good morning. Lila MacLellan here, filling in for Diane Brady. It’s a dilemma any CEO who has taken over a troubled-yet-beloved brand can relate to. How do you freshen things up without alienating loyal customers? We’re talking, of course, about the frenzy around Cracker Barrel, which has seen a brutal reaction to its modernization push and especially its new streamlined logo unveiled last week. Although the logo looked similar to the old one—brown and yellow with the same old-timey font—it didn’t include a literal barrel and the elderly character who had sat on a chair next to it for most of the company’s 56 years.
When I asked David Reibstein, a professor of marketing at The Wharton School, for his take on the fiasco, he gave the company and CEO Julie Felss Masino a mixed review. Brands have little choice but to make refreshments and face the ire of loyal customers who might feel unsettled by newness, so he applauds the CEO for insisting that Cracker Barrel evolve.
After all, as Jake Bartlett, an analyst at Truist Securities, points out, foot traffic at the restaurants has been dropping for years, and Masino, who joined in 2023, promised investors a grand transformation that will pay off in 2027. “They do need to widen their demographic appeal,” he says, “and make sure that they’re appealing to young families and younger consumers.”
To that end the company had been testing a range of updated, less cluttered interiors at a fraction of its shops and talking to investors and customers about the experiments for months. Masino also recently appeared on Good Morning America and addressed some criticism of the new look; despite social media posts featuring customers calling the remodels bland and charmless, the CEO said most feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. She also reassured fans that the Cracker Barrel of their childhoods is still intact. “The soul of Cracker Barrel is not changing,” she said. “The rocking chairs are still there. The fireplace is there, the peg game, all the things that make Cracker Barrel, Cracker Barrel.”
But when it came to the logo change, the company said little, and the market filled in the blank, deriding the logo as boring. Some conservative activists went further, accusing the CEO of abandoning the brand’s heritage in the name of “wokeness.” That line of discussion escalated to an absurd degree.
The core of the issue may not be the logo at all. It’s that, in revamping the company’s image, leadership failed to communicate a vision of Cracker Barrel’s next chapter. “It’d be nice if Cracker Barrel would say, ‘Here’s what we now stand for,’” Reibstein observed, rather than, ‘We’ve just changed some of the background around our name.’”
That’s something the late graphic designer Paul Rand, who created IBM’s iconic eye-bee-“M” rebus logo, knew all too well. “A logo derives its meaning from the quality of the thing it symbolizes,” he once wrote, “not the other way around.” —Lila MacLellan
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Today’s edition of CEO Daily was compiled and edited by Joey Abrams and Nicholas Gordon.
