When Cracker Barrel unveiled its new logo as part of a larger rebranding initiative this summer, the company hoped it would symbolize a new era for the company. The sleek, simplified branding was linked to the restaurant’s newly modernized interiors and menu, an attempt to revitalize the struggling roadside chain for a younger generation.
But instead of a glow-up, the new logo caused a blow-up.
After a week of social-media attacks, news-channel coverage, and even attention from the White House, Cracker Barrel backed down, reverting to its original, folksy logo.
The episode epitomized an increasingly common nightmare for marketers: when your new rebrand or advertising campaign runs face-first into a severe online backlash.
Today’s polarized culture, coupled with the tendency for social media to reward outrage with engagement, can cause a small spark of controversy to spread like wildfire. From Bud Light’s campaign with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney to the American Eagle Outfitters “good jeans” campaign with actress Sydney Sweeney, marketing initiatives can quickly become battlegrounds in the culture war.
But careful planning before the launch of a new brand or ad campaign can help companies avoid the worst, limit the damage, or even transform a backlash into a positive boost. Kellogg’s Timothy Calkins, a clinical professor of marketing, explains how, in an interview with Kellogg Insight.
INSIGHT: Before the controversy kicked up, Cracker Barrel seemed like it was attempting a straightforward brand refresh, right? What were they trying to do?
CALKINS: To understand the Cracker Barrel situation, you have to go back to how the company has been performing. The company’s been doing poorly. Its profits are down dramatically. Over the past five years, the stock price has been slumping, and clearly Cracker Barrel hasn’t been performing well. They weren’t bringing in people like they needed to, and the consumer base was aging. So they said, “we need to update our stores to make sure they feel like they are welcoming and relevant places people want to go. We have to make sure our imagery is welcoming and up –to date and timely.”
So they rolled out a whole program with three big elements. The first part was the store renovations, where they changed the interior look and feel of the restaurants. They also went ahead and updated the menu and brought in some more-contemporary dishes. Then they updated the logo.
They have been gradually renovating stores and rolling out the new look, and there has been a little bit of grumbling about that along the way. But everything blew up when the logo news came out.
INSIGHT: So as far as deciding to refresh their brand, Cracker Barrel was following standard marketing strategy?
CALKINS: Companies do this all the time. They routinely update their product offerings, their imagery, and their communication. So I think it was a hundred percent reasonable for Cracker Barrel to try to do that. I don’t think you can criticize Cracker Barrel for what they were trying to do. You can debate somewhat how they were doing it, but there’s no outrageous behavior. They weren’t dramatically changing this brand. This is the case of a brand doing the logical thing and trying to remain relevant.
INSIGHT: So it’s fair to say that the backlash came as a surprise to both Cracker Barrel and marketing experts?
CALKINS: Yes, I don’t think anybody anticipated that something like this would blow up in the way that it did, and it blew up so fast and with such a level of emotional intensity. It was astonishing. You’re going on TikTok, and your whole feed is full of people complaining about the rebranding of Cracker Barrel.
As a brand, that’s really a problem. We are in such a fractured world where people get hyped up about things. And that becomes, in some ways, almost scary, because you get people who are so intense about what they’re doing. It’s a business issue, but it goes beyond that. It becomes an issue for the employees, your partners, your suppliers. Everybody connected to this brand is now looking over their shoulder a little bit.
I think it’s a really interesting dynamic. This is just a logo change, they’re not dramatically changing the logo, and yet people are making accusations that this is the end of the world. It’s astonishing how it played out. And then to top it all off, the president jumps in on it, and that’s a whole different milestone.
So now you’ve got a world where the president of the United States is willing to express opinions about the logo of a restaurant chain. That’s a new time for marketers.
INSIGHT: Was there anything that Cracker Barrel could have done before they announced the refresh that would have helped manage the controversy?
CALKINS: The problem as a marketer is anticipating this reaction, because you can’t be certain if it is going to happen or not, and you don’t know where it’s going to come from. You don’t know what might hit some influencer’s topic someday and trigger another influencer, and then, all of a sudden, we are off to the races.
As a marketer, all you can do is be very thoughtful about what you’re doing and then be very clear on how you’ll respond. What marketers should do is think through if this program, this plan, this change does spark a big controversy, what are we going to do? How are we going to respond to that? And if you think that out ahead of time, you can be ready to move quickly because speed is everything in situations like this.
INSIGHT: What can a company do to lower the chance of a backlash?
CALKINS: I think you want to be very careful about anything you do that could be taken with a political spin. And that is hard. Most companies do not want to be either Republican or Democratic by nature, so they try to stay to the middle. So one thing is to just be super thoughtful about what you’re doing, especially right now.
It’s especially true if you’re working with iconic brands that have a big history because there’s a lot more risk of things blowing up, because people have these feelings for these brands that are very powerful. It reflects the way we communicate now. It reflects the way these platforms work. So that is what’s different now. It’s a little harder for companies to be straight down the middle, and it creates lots of complexity.
INSIGHT: Can a slow or phased rollout in limited markets help companies avoid negative attention?
CALKINS: Certainly, that can help. One of the nice things is it’s less of a target, because when somebody’s making a change in one part of the country, most people don’t see the change. They’re not part of it, so it’s not interesting for them. So in a way, you’ve taken away the story from a lot of the critics.
But it doesn’t mean that you necessarily can guarantee your safety, because in this case, Cracker Barrel, they had already begun renovating the stores, but it just flamed when the logo changed.
INSIGHT: What about focus groups? Is there something different companies need to do as part of that process to try and anticipate a backlash?
CALKINS: I think you have to be careful with focus groups because I think you can make bad decisions if you rely too heavily on them. You would think it would be the opposite: we should do more focus groups, more consumer testing. Given the world we’re in, I actually think maybe it’s the opposite. And the reason is: focus groups, if done well, give you a good read on how people are feeling today, but that doesn’t tell you anything about how they’re going to feel tomorrow.
In the case of Cracker Barrel, I suspect they did a lot of focus groups. And people said, it’s fine, it’s a change, but it looks nice, and the restaurants look great, and the logo is okay. Nothing polarizing there. It’s all fine.
But then you get out of the focus group and hear somebody on TikTok explaining why this is all so terrible and the destruction of our legacy and the history of society. Then you say, no, it is outrageous, isn’t it? I am hacked off. This is terrible.
I think that’s a way focus groups and market research actually can limit you. Yes, you should always talk to your customers. But you can’t assume that’s going to give you cover or that will ensure you’re not going to run into controversy. Because in the world of influencer marketing, it’s really not a question of the majority; it’s a question of a few individuals.
These online creators need something to talk about, and they love things that will get people fired up—things that are timely and interesting, engaging. And this Cracker Barrel story is totally that. It’s a story that never should have attracted the attention it did.
INSIGHT: Let’s talk more about those influencers, who played such a large role in the Cracker Barrel controversy. How can companies navigate this new era of marketing?
CALKINS: One of the things I think companies have to do is be really thoughtful about how they engage with influencers. That is where people are spending their time and their attention, and that is also where people are placing their trust.
The thing Cracker Barrel didn’t have in all of this is people supporting the plan. You want to have 5,000 influencers out there who love Cracker Barrel, who are saying, “we love the fact that this company’s investing in this brand and fixing things up and investing for the future.” If you’re a brand, you’ve really got to be in touch with your supporters and you’ve got to be out there encouraging them to say good things about you.
Real supporters provide input but also become real champions for the brand. You rely on those people to go put out content for you, and then you take that content and you can boost it. You can take this creator-generated content and use that content, which has a level of authenticity that is real, to promote your brand in a way that doesn’t come across as corporate speak. It comes across as real honest feedback.
Companies need to be very proactive at managing influencers. Be very thoughtful, and curate a group of people to support your brand. It’s all about how do you become part of the conversation, because advertising doesn’t do it right now.
INSIGHT: Do you think there is any silver lining for Cracker Barrel as this controversy dies down? To put it another way, is there really “no such thing as bad publicity” in today’s environment?
CALKINS: There’s nothing in the Cracker Barrel move that suggests that the company was hoping for this kind of reaction. But they might end up coming out of this in much better shape than we would anticipate.
People are thinking about Cracker Barrel a lot, and we live in an attention economy, where getting people to think about your brand is not so easy. The company responded by backing off the logo change, and I think that does a good thing because now people say, “they listened, they responded, we were right by the way, and now we feel a lot better about Cracker Barrel.”
Then people might say, “wow, I think maybe we should stop by there and see how it looks.” So when all is said and done, this might be the case where the Cracker Barrel stock takes a hit, but ultimately the company comes back and flourishes.
Controversy can work in a positive way depending on how a company can address it. I don’t think controversy is necessarily bad. It is bad depending on what it’s about, and it’s bad depending on how the company responds.