On Tuesday, the United States commander-in-chief weighed in on one of the most pressing issues facing our nation: the rebranding of a restaurant chain.
Last week, Cracker Barrel, a Tennessee company whose nationwide locations lean heavily on a cozy, old-timey aesthetic – “rocking chairs on the porch, a warm fire in the hearth, peg games on the table” – announced it was updating its logo.
Uncle Herschel, the man who once appeared next to the letters with a barrel, was gone. It sparked ire on the right, with Donald Trump Jr leading a charge against the rebranding: “WTF is wrong with Cracker Barrel?!” Later, Trump Sr weighed in, suggesting the company “admit a mistake”.
Businesses change their logos all the time – and there was nothing noteworthy about the bland new image. So why did Cracker Barrel’s shift prompt such anger on the right?
It starts with the company’s position in the popular imagination. Cracker Barrel is “part of the cultural landscape”, says Neeraj Bharadwaj, Proffitt’s professor in marketing at the University of Tennessee’s Haslam school of business. “It’s an institution.”
The new logo was part of an effort to reach younger customers with a sleeker, more contemporary look. But such an update conflicts with the company’s image. Founded in 1969, the restaurant is known for its southern comfort food, including fried chicken and biscuits and gravy; antique decoration; and general store items such as old-fashioned candy.
“It has this kind of stylized or idealized representation of what I think many would define as the ‘good old days’,” says Jarvis Sam, founder and CEO of the Rainbow Disruption and professor of the practice at Brown University and University of California, Berkeley. “But for others, its imagery of histories of exclusion, of racial inequity, and this romanticization of a time that was not that great, actually – it was not equally safe and nostalgic for everyone.”
The Cracker Barrel case was a kind of “proxy for the larger culture war that’s being developed around who actually owns the American story”, Sam says.
“Because people feel so connected and entrenched with the nostalgia of some of these experiences, it leads to backlash when there is change,” he adds.
That, of course, made it an easy target for political figures who stand to benefit from the culture war. “At best, it’s political theater,” says Sam. Leaders leveraged a minor change at a chain restaurant to deliver their message – including the idea that “woke culture is problematic and will create threat to the American society, and a devolution of what we understand to be traditional American history”.
Cracker Barrel has a dark history of its own. In 1991, the company declared it was founded “on concept of traditional American values” – which were inconsistent with employees who failed “to demonstrate normal heterosexual values”. It fired 11 LGBTQ+ workers, leading to protests. It appeared to back down on the statement, though activists said the workers had not been rehired and bought stock to pressure the company. It added sexual orientation to its nondiscrimination policy in 2002.
Two years later, however, the chain paid $8.7m to settle 40 plaintiffs’ claims of racist treatment of Black customers and discrimination against Black workers. Allegations across 16 states included denial of service and segregation of Black diners, the use of racial slurs and serving food out of the garbage. The plaintiffs’ lawyer called the settlement “good closure to a bad period”.
Amid the latest controversy, the loudest voices calling for change have been on the right – but they seem to have penetrated the wider American consciousness. Seventy-six percent of respondents to a YouGov poll said they preferred the old logo, and the backlash was enough to sink Cracker Barrel’s value by almost $100m and draw a quasi-apology, with the company saying on Tuesday it “could’ve done a better job sharing who we are and who we’ll always be”. That statement appeared to suggest the company was sticking with the change, but later in the day, it acquiesced: Uncle Herschel, it seems, is sticking around. On Wednesday, shares rose 8%.
So what is the business lesson in all this? For one thing, says Sam, it suggests that “whatever market research they did, did not include the majority of their consumers” – if it had, the company would have been prepared for this response.
Instead, the company suffered a self-inflicted wound by “trying to celebrate the design change and show that they’re adapting to the times”, says Bill Pearce, a continuing professional faculty member at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. A slow, careful rollout would have been safer; still, going back on the plan just made things even more complicated. “It feels like dear leader has expressed an opinion, so we must support dear leader,” he says. That may not play well with the 50% of Americans who did not vote for Trump.
“If they believed in the design, they should have stuck with it, and if they retrenched so quickly, well, that’s an indication that they didn’t believe in the design and probably shouldn’t have gone ahead in the first place,” Pearce says of Cracker Barrel. “They’re blowing with the wind.” It’s reminiscent of the 1985 New Coke debacle, in which Coca-Cola released a new formula only to withdraw it within 77 days and return to the “classic” one.
Of course, that was a customer uprising, not a political one – the soda crisis somehow did not make it to the top of Ronald Reagan’s agenda. Which raises a bigger question: “If, five years ago, a senator had come out with a statement on this, they would have been excoriated by their own party” for weighing in on the behavior of a private company, Pearce says. “Where’s the outrage that the president of the United States even notices this?”