The Saturday List - August 23

Some Things (About Cracker Barrel) You May Have Missed From The Past Week (When Cracker Barrel Changed Its Logo)

It’s a slightly different newsletter this week — trying out a new format and posting on LinkedIn — so let’s dive in.

LogoGate 2025: Et Tu, Cracker Barrel?

You know it’s bad when it appears to be a “both sides” issue: Cracker Barrel entered the public consciousness — for the first time in a long time, actually; when were YOU last in a Cracker Barrel restaurant? — thanks to an appearance on Good Morning America where the CEO announced that they were changing the logo. Oh they’re also refreshing the stores, but that is an aside to the idea that the old logo (below) needed fixin’.

What’s wrong with a little Americana? What’s wrong with a chap called Herschel sitting on a chair — a chair that needed to be “caned” no less — leaning on a barrel that actually holds crackers?

Plenty, it seems. Nostalgia be darned, here’s what they came up with; a pox upon the design consultants who told them “YES, YOU NEED A NEW LOGO, HERE’S OUR INVOICE.”

Insult to injury: they’ve updated the look of the restaurants, too. Gone is the kitsch, replaced by what would happen if you went to ChatGPT and asked for a modern-looking chain restaurant.

Le Sigh.

Logos Aren’t All Supposed To Be The Same!

A website called Velvet Shark wrote about this NEARLY FIVE YEARS AGO and most design teams and most executive teams must not have gotten the memo.

Can we not as a species read cursive? (Maybe Gen-Z can’t.) Do we require everything to be simplified for us, because our brains have maxed out on computing power and we just can’t process anything more than sans-serif letters?

Or is it just that the same gaggle of consulting firms and design shops are still making bank with the same tried-and-true formulas: “What you really need is…A NEW LOGO!”

But Wait, There’s More!

Try to pinpoint (from this 5-day chart) exactly when news of the logo hit. There’s been a little bit of a comeback, sure — and, to be fair, the stock is UP from its 52-week low — but YIKES, that’s not good news.

What Can We Learn From All This?

I have a couple ideas…a list, of sorts, since this is called The Saturday List…and here goes:

1. Just Because You Can…

Every executive WANTS to put their stamp on things. CEOs do it, CMOs do it — in fact, CMOs do it probably more often because no job needs to prove that it’s “doing something” faster than a new CMO — and you’ve probably felt pressure to do it at a new gig. How can I make an impact as quickly as possible?

But, but, but: the pressure to make an immediate impact is almost always misguided. (I’ve worked with a couple smart C-suite folks who got into the gig and…waited. Without the additional pressure of “WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING” they sorted through the pluses and minuses of big changes, opting instead for a more calculated, precise approach to the little course corrections necessary to add value.)

2. Remember The Four Ps of Marketing?

Refresher: Product, Price, Place, Promotion. And sometimes you have three of them correct and the fourth is what kills you.

We actually had a real-world example of this very question as it pertained to Cracker Barrel just this week: On a family trip, headed from the Midwest into the Mid-South, and lo and behold it was time to eat. The question: “Can we do Cracker Barrel?” The answer: “NO.”

Why? In this case, I can tell you exactly which of the four was the problem:

• Price: Not an issue here. We’re gonna spend 15-20 bucks a head no matter where we stop. We were looking for a quality meal.

• Place: These are restaurants that are often near an interstate. It’s part of a road trip, you expect to find one nearby, and the signs pointed to one coming up…right when we were hungry.

• Promotion: Those signs actually warned us about a half-hour earlier: Cracker Barrel coming up. Note the exit number.

• Product: Here’s the winner. Or loser. Something clicked in everybody’s head. Has the food quality slipped? (Yes.) Was our last experience — a few years back, if our party recalled correctly — worth it? (No.) How does it stack up against the other options? (Not very well, it seemed.)

3. It’s Incumbent Upon Consultants To ADD VALUE

I had many years as an independent consultant; I worked in communications, product marketing, and branding. And I turned down a lot of work.

Seriously, I was probably too direct and it cost me money BUT I was able to sleep at night. Why?

I’d tell the prospective client something from this list — and often more than one thing and maybe all of them — as a reason that I couldn’t help them:

• You’re too early. You need more time to understand what it is you’re trying to do as a business.

• Your idea needs work. Sometimes it needed serious work.

• You should invest the money you were going to spend with me on…something else. Operations. Product development. Research.

Imagine the type of trusted advisor you would be if, instead of a 7-figure brand refresh, you had a 6-figure body of research that said “Maybe your problem isn’t the logo, but the food? Maybe the stores don’t need to be refreshed, but the ingredients do?”

There You Have It…

Would my Cracker Barrel logo relaunch project have looked like this? Would yours? Would it have even gotten off the ground?

Questions to ask yourself next time you are looking at the chance to make a big splash — or, even better, no splash at all.