The one Cracker Barrel rebrand take that matters.

Unless you communicate via an old-timey wooden crank telephone, you’ve probably heard about the Cracker Barrel rebrand. You have probably seen the logo they paid someone millions of dollars to flatten into oblivion. 

You may have read take after take on LinkedIn. Here’s the take that matters …

Do not do this. Do not take a truly distinctive brand asset like your logo — and the Cracker Barrel logo is very, very distinctive — and change it. Ever. To paraphrase Professor Mark Ritson, the only reason to change your logo is because a judge ordered you to in a court of law. 

Distinctive Brand Assets are the codes and cues customers use to find you. If they can’t find your brand quickly, they will buy a different brand. It’s as simple as that. 

This happened to Tropicana back in 2009. They removed the orange and the straw, flattened their logo into oblivion (and paid an agency something like $35 million to do it), and people literally could not find them on the shelves. They lost $50 million in sales in the first month alone. But no one learns anything, so here we are again. 

Customers, and this is incredibly important to remember, do not care about brands. They only care about their needs, wants and desires. Customers also crave familiarity and convenience, which is what brands offer. People care about brands in roughly the same way Packers fans care about the colors green and gold — in context. There’s nothing inherently meaningful about that green and gold combination unless you also have the “G.”  

So if your brand happens to satisfy their needs, wants and desires, and your brand is known and trusted, and your brand comes to mind in a buying situation, and customers are able to find you easily, then your potential buyers are more likely to become actual buyers. 

(There is one other exception: It’s okay to change your logo and other distinctive brand assets if you’re a young brand, no one knows who you are and your DBAs look like every other brand in the category.)

So what happened with Cracker Barrel? Why did they change? Intense internal pressure to do something, probably. Revenue has been somewhat sluggish. Their target market is rapidly becoming very old. Cracker Barrel itself has become something of a sleeping giant. 

Instead of diagnosing the actual problem, setting a guiding principle and following up with actions that make any kind of sense, they decided to redo their menus, renovate their restaurants entirely, and completely eliminate what made Cracker Barrel distinctive. Their whole thing was nostalgic, country Americana. Is that still their thing? We don’t know.

What should they have done? Call us for starters, but here’s what we probably would’ve told Cracker Barrel:

1. Keep the eclectic country vibe, clean everything and fix broken stuff. New carpet? Great. New everything? Less great. Revise the menu by eliminating dishes that don’t sell and don’t fit with your Americana vibe. Do less and do it better. Anyone who has ever watched an episode of “Kitchen Nightmares” with Gordon Ramsay would know this.
2. Talk to your customers. Why are they here? When do they eat there? What do they love? What’s great? What’s not? What about people who don’t eat at Cracker Barrel? What do they think about your brand? Where do they eat instead? When, why and with whom? Marketing is supposed to be the voice of the customer, so listen to them.
3. Create a national ad campaign built on Category Entry Points — a family getting together for Sunday dinner just like Grandma used to make, a young couple moving across the country to start a new life, friends on a long summer road trip, parents taking their oldest kid to college. One category entry point per ad, please. Emotional, fun, funny, warm, nostalgic, memory-building. Maybe the actor who plays the waitress could become a recurring character, a throughline and a fluent device like Flo from Progressive.

None of this is rocket surgery. Easier said than done? Yes. Complicated? No. 

Now let’s talk about Chili’s. Last year, it was the number one casual dining chain in the country. In 2024, customers spent nearly $5 billion (!!?!) at Chili’s. That’s a lot of smash burgers. Not that long ago, Chili’s was in big trouble. So how’d they turn it around? 

Chili’s simplified their menu. They hired more people and trained them better so they could provide better service, turn over more tables and sell more food. They renovated their restaurants without changing what makes Chili’s Chili’s. They launched the 3 for Me value platform and a national ad campaign. Chili’s also brought back their famous Baby Back Ribs and their “Baby Back Ribs” jingle, an absolute banger from back in the day. 

The restaurants are newer and cleaner, wait times are way down and customers are much happier (and there are more of them). Also, management turnover is way, way down, though probably not because of the jingle. 

Did Chili’s change their logo? They did not. 

But the newer news is that Cracker Barrel went back to the old logo, so why does any of this matter, and what does it mean for you?

Cracker Barrel spent something like $700 million to completely redesign their stores, retool their menus and change their distinctive brand assets. That’s a lot of money even for a billion-dollar brand. Were they having revenue problems? Sure. Are they optimizing for efficiency instead of the customer experience? Probably. Does a new logo fix any of that? No. Does the old logo fix any of that? Also no. 

How do you solve business problems? Research. Diagnosis. A guiding principle. Coherent actions based on the principles of marketing effectiveness. In other words, strategy. 

Give us a call, and we’ll walk you through it. See you next time! 

Sources!

1. A Deep Dive Into the Chili’s Turnaround that Shook Up Casual Dining – FSR magazine
2. Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters – Richard Rumelt