Tuesday night, Cracker Barrel returned to its old logo, cashiering a bland, modern design that drew widespread revulsion in its first week. Some reporters were quick to blame this on social media backlash, which indeed occurred, or on political conservatives, many of whom were unhappy with the logo rollout. But tweets and political rhetoric are downstream of a more important backlash by the people who pay Cracker Barrel’s bills: customers and shareholders.
One only needs to look at Cracker Barrel’s stock price tumble of more than 14% last week to see that investors weren’t happy, and what investors do with their money is more predictive than qualitative social media sentiment. It’s easy to see why shareholders were spooked. Shortly after the logo launch, the chain’s CEO Julie Felss Masino remarked,“Cracker Barrel needs to feel like the Cracker Barrel for today and for tomorrow.” It seems she was unaware that the appeal of the brand she heads depends on its old-time charm. That misunderstanding, in line with branding misfires by other corporations in recent years, generated a valuable lesson: Companies that turn against their customers’ preferences in the name of modernization aren’t doing their duty to their shareholders.
A view that streamlined, “modern” logos are more visible on social media often drives such design choices, but that trade-off requires sacrificing what makes a brand distinctive — such as “Uncle Herschel” and his trademark barrel. It also misunderstands Cracker Barrel’s fundamental appeal to visitors and long-time fans. The company traditionally focused on family-friendly locations near interstate highways as a convenient stop-off for drivers, with both dine-in restaurants and retail for the road. This audience has minimal overlap with the clientele of Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, where Cracker Barrel opened a pop-up store with its scrapped logo and held a made-for-Instagram square dance event that flopped spectacularly.
Unfortunately, Cracker Barrel was the latest in a line of companies to decide that the customer is not always right, instead using fleeting social media trends and homogenous design standards as their north star. A November 2024 video advertisement by Jaguar was roundly criticized for its aesthetic ugliness, its gratuitously woke gender-bending, and its suspicious lack of a single car, making the advert a complete waste of consumers’ time. And Bud Light’s 2023 social media campaign with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney did the beer no favors. Those problems only compounded when a marketing exec at parent company Anheuser-Busch described the brand as “fratty” and “out of touch,” which any reasonable person could see as contempt for her own product’s clientele.
As such, many Cracker Barrel fans rightly recognized yet another case of a beloved brand being potentially being harmed by executives with a different view of how things should be done. And some shareholders, such as activist investor Sandar Biglari, also recognized that Masino’s plans would do nothing to fix financial woes at the company. Good on Cracker Barrel for recognizing that the customer is sometimes right.
Cracker Barrel’s fandom revolted not out of malice, but in an act of tough love. President Trump expressed his disapproval of the new Cracker Barrel logo both publicly and privately to company leadership, offering them some free business advice. On Truth Social, he posted, “Cracker Barrel should go back to the old logo, admit a mistake based on customer response (the ultimate Poll), and manage the company better than ever before.” Still, he noted a silver lining: “They got a Billion Dollars worth of free publicity if they play their cards right.”
By market close on Wednesday, August 27, Cracker Barrel’s shares surged more than 8% beyond the stock’s price on August 19 when the misbegotten logo was introduced. Whatever else might be said about Donald Trump, he knows how to get free publicity, and Cracker Barrel would be foolish not to heed his advice.
