On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump weighed in on a pressing national issue: 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.”
Photo: AFP
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,” said 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,’” said Jarvis Sam, professor of practice at Brown University, “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 said, adding that “because people feel so connected and entrenched with the nostalgia of some of these experiences, it leads to backlash when there is change.”
That made it an easy target for political figures who stand to benefit from the culture war.
“At best, it’s political theater,” Sam said.
Leaders leveraged a minor change at a chain restaurant to deliver their message — including the idea that “woke culture is problematic and will create a threat to the American society, and a devolution of what we understand to be traditional American history,” he said.
HISTORY
Cracker Barrel has a dark history of its own. In 1991, the company declared it was founded “on the 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, although activists said the workers had not been rehired and bought stock to pressure the company.
The company added sexual orientation to its nondiscrimination policy in 2002.
However, two years later, the chain paid US$8.7 million 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 a “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 US 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 US$100 million and draw a quasi-apology, with the company on Tuesday saying 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 percent.
BUSINESS LESSONS
The companiy’s logo retreat suggests that “whatever market research they did, it did not include the majority of their consumers,” if it had, the company would have been prepared for this response, Sam said.
Instead, the company experienced a self-inflicted wound by “trying to celebrate the design change and show that they’re adapting to the times,” said 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.
“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 said. “They’re blowing with the wind.”
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