Editorial
The Gist
- Brand redesign. Cracker Barrel redesigned its logo, receiving backlash from customers who felt the logo signaled that they were no longer welcome at CB restaurants.
- Brand evolution. Managing brand assets to appeal to changing customer tastes is not easy – often evolution allows brands to change gracefully.
- Brand management. Marketers must include their current customer base in their plans to evolve a brand.
For marketers, a lot is being said about the Cracker Barrel rebranding fiasco. The restaurant chain is the latest brand to be criticized by its customer base over changes to its logo and offering direction.
Much of the online noise feels like rage bait.
But to Cracker Barrel’s executive team, the online commentary likely felt like much more than rage bait for attention. The brand discontinued its planned rebranding, which featured an updated logo.
Marketers are increasingly facing customer reaction in public spaces, with the potential for brand goodwill increasingly at risk.
Working to minimize risk in rebranding has been elevated into higher table stakes. Marketers must treat messaging for new brand assets as a compressed timeline to avoid the potential elimination of brand goodwill forever.
Table of Contents
- What Led to the Cracker Barrel Rebranding?
- Affection for Uncle Herschel: Customer Loyalty in Action
- What it Takes to Rebrand a Brand
- How to Make a Rebranding Strategy Stick
- Metrics to Monitor Rebranding Progress Over Time
- Recognizing the Value of Cultural Meaning
- Expect Brand Controversy With Brand Change
What Led to the Cracker Barrel Rebranding?
Seeking to keep up with restaurant chains, Cracker Barrel launched a new simplified logo along with a revised menu. The campaign, called “ALL The More," was part of a campaign started in 2024 to revitalize sales, which had gone flat that year.
The Cracker Barrel logo was restyled to a flat, modern design. The intent behind the new logo was to ease recognition of Cracker Barrel on various media platforms, including digital channels and screens of all sizes.
The new design eliminated the Uncle Herschel character, an old man sitting next to a barrel:
Cracker Barrel just unveiled its first logo redesign in 48 years! The iconic man-on-barrel is gone, replaced by a clean, text-only design in classic gold and brown. Tied to the "All the More" campaign, it’s got fans talking: some love the modern update, others miss the nostalgic… pic.twitter.com/6ibOkm4czz
— Markos.DU (@markos_du) August 21, 2025
Affection for Uncle Herschel: Customer Loyalty in Action
Uncle Herschel has the same customer beloved association with a brand like Colonel Sanders is for KFC. But Uncle Herschel was based on a real person, the uncle to Cracker Barrel Old Country Store’s founder Dan Evins. He spent his retirement years at the restaurants, doling out warm greetings, long stories and uplifting conversations to customers.
Herschel’s personality became legendary, cementing Cracker Barrel's appeal among Southern communities. After his retirement, Herschel brought the long-standing tradition of being a good neighbor to each and every Cracker Barrel store. After the uncle passed away, the "Uncle Herschel" character was added in his honor, and to uphold the experiences customers had liked among chain employees and company staff. The character logo has been present on its restaurant signs and promotions since 1977.
Backlash for Removal of Uncle Herschel
When the logo was announced, some people demonstrated disapproval of the new logo. They felt Uncle Herschel should not have been dropped, and that decision to remove him implied that their presence was not welcome anymore.
Many notable people spoke out against the logo. President Donald Trump’s comments against Cracker Barrel became the highest-profile response, but people more closely aligned with the company spoke out against the logo. A news segment on NewsChannel 5 in Nashville featured comments from Tommy Lowe, a former Cracker Barrel executive. Lowe was critical of the strategy, calling it too focused on competition.
The backlash led to a hit to Cracker Barrel’s stock value. The share price dropped from $59.02 when the market closed on Aug. 20 to $50.76 by midday on Aug. 21 though it recovered slightly to $54.80 by the end of the trading period.
A day after President Trump’s comment, Cracker Barrel scrapped the logo. In an online statement, the company stated that it was “grateful for the heart-filled voices” who responded.
Related Article: 6 Worst Marketing Campaigns of All Time
Timeline of the Cracker Barrel Rebranding Controversy
The following timeline captures the key moments of Cracker Barrel’s short-lived rebranding effort, the public backlash, and the company’s decision to revert its logo. Each event is linked to reporting sources for further reading.
| Date | Event | Details & Sources |
|---|---|---|
| March 2025 | Agencies onboarded | Cracker Barrel partners with Viral Nation, Prophet and Blue Engine for its brand refresh. Fox Business |
| 2024 (context) | Modernization plan announced | Company begins a multi-year rebrand, including store remodels and menu changes. Branding Journal, Snopes |
| Aug 18–19 | Logo unveiled | A simplified, text-only logo debuts as part of the “All the More” campaign. India Times, Snopes, Branding Journal |
| Aug 19–20 | Backlash grows | Social media erupts, critics slam redesign as “woke” or “bland.” Stock dips by ~10–12%. New York Post, Daily Beast |
| Aug 21 | Public figures weigh in | Donald Trump Jr. and co-founder Tommy Lowe blast the redesign. New York Post, WSJ |
| Aug 25–26 | Reversal announced | Company pledges to restore the old “Old Timer” logo, citing customer voices. ABC News, People, Branding Journal |
| Aug 27 | Old logo reinstated | Original “Old Timer” logo restored across channels. New York Post, Wikipedia |
| Aug 29 | Website changes | Diversity, equity, inclusion, and Pride sections quietly removed from company site. Wikipedia |
| Early September | Satire & commentary | Media continues to satirize the controversy as part of culture-war branding debates. Guardian, Washington Post |
What it Takes to Rebrand a Brand
To understand the Cracker Barrel fiasco, we need to acknowledge the hard challenge brand executives have. Cracker Barrel’s leadership team faced one of the hardest commercial challenges in branding—expanding a culturally rich, heritage brand into new customer groups without losing its core audience. That’s not an easy campaign or a quarterly earnings trick. That’s long-term, high-stakes brand transformation.
We also need to acknowledge another typical challenge facing any executive team guiding a brand: brand transformations are hard. Customers have bought into what the brand messages have been, backed up by product or service features they have liked for years, even decades. Then there's the digital challenges to rebranding, but that's another tale for another time.
Marketing teams tasked with rebranding often heavily invest in advertising, offering redesign and redesigning brand assets, and then cut the campaign too soon to let customers understand the new message.
One example is the Gap. Gap's 2010 logo redesign involved replacing its iconic blue box logo with a plain Helvetica font and a tiny blue square. The new design received immediate negative backlash from customers who preferred the classic design. The company was forced to revert the design after only one week.
But there have been successful logo transitions, even with flat designs. In 2016 MasterCard removed text to focus on the iconic overlapping circles, modernizing digital adaptability and making the brand more recognizable across different platforms. The simplification strategy ensures the logo remains effective in both digital and physical spaces.
Rebranding Requires Superior Brand Messaging
Successful rebranding is more than tactics. It demands real mastery of brand messaging that accounts for timing as much as it does marketplace conditions.
Designers and industry experts have been researching how rounded corners versus sharp corners impact customer acceptance; a series of research papers have been published on the topic over the years. But focusing on media design can overlook key messaging aspects of the original design that customers admired about the current logo.
How to Make a Rebranding Strategy Stick
With all the excitement winding down, what can CMOs learn from the Cracker Barrel fiasco? Much of what marketers orchestrate should lead to the right crisis response.
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Here are a few elements that marketers should emphasize when planning a rebranding:
- Only remove or revise figures associated with out-of-date norms. Cracker Barrel may have been modernizing its logo. But there is a difference in history between Uncle Herschel and other long-standing brand characters that have a more controversial history, like Aunt Jemima. Quaker Oats replaced Aunt Jemima with a new brand, Pearl Milling, after increasing customer backlash over the troubled racial implications of the Aunt Jemima character. In contrast, Uncle Herschel’s history was not steeped in an outdated social norm.
- Introduce brand changes incrementally to customers. Planning campaign assets that seed a rebranding marketing strategy improves the chances of positive customer acceptance. Branding assets released over time create a communication “bridge” towards the intended customer audience. An example is Starbucks’ logo evolution. Starbucks has progressively simplified its logo over the years, removing text and focusing on just the mermaid emblem. By 2011, the logo evolved into its simplest form with no words at all, reflecting Starbucks' confidence in global brand recognition through its offerings, both new and long-standing. A change to a brand message is not acceptable overnight, but every message attempt is meant to align offerings to what customers should expect.
- Build bridges for customer adoption beyond logos. Great strategy finds shared values across current and new customer types. The job of a rebranding effort is to direct customer audiences around new experiences while honoring past values—instead of messaging that to abandon them.
Also, marketers should plan campaign measurement so that customer response is noticeable. As I mentioned in my article on Jaguar, marketers should pick metrics and KPIs that can link customer response to the campaign objectives.
Related Article: CMOs, Can You Sell Luxury Without a Product? Jaguar's Doing It
Metrics to Monitor Rebranding Progress Over Time
Marketers can rely on many standard metrics to monitor brand progress. The following table lists a few metrics marketers can focus upon when rebranding their company.
| Brand Risk Element | KPI | Reasoning |
|---|---|---|
| Brand Health | Share of Voice | Able to quickly monitor changes in customer and industry conversations about the brand |
| Customer Behavior | Churn Rate | Changes in loyal customer behavior |
| Sales Impact | Same Store Sales | Immediate impacts on in-person purchases |
| Customer Interest | Net Promoter Score | Changes in customers’ interest in recommending your offering |
| Customer Acquisition | Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) | Note if the acquisition costs for customers are changing over a period |
| Media Sentiment | Sentiment Analysis (Media Mentions) | Note positive or negative mentions of a brand within the industry |
Marketers can select some or all the metrics. The key framework to be developed is one that monitors these metrics over time, constructing threshold ideas as to what to continue versus what to abandon. Immediate abandonment signals can be planned for events during the first 48 to 72 hours, then planned to be examined on a weekly basis.
Some metrics, like the share of voice, can work within the hourly monitoring, while others, like the net promoter score, work best with longer-term periods. Marketers with a timetable will pick the right metrics so that meaningful changes match up to a reasonable time period for measurement.
Recognizing the Value of Cultural Meaning
Ultimately, brand managers recognize that brands with cultural meaning can’t be treated like a normal campaign. Traditional brands matter, particularly as people feel a bit of anxiety in certain circles. Such brands are living, social artifacts. In the current era, where marketing to consumers can mean cultural representation in brands infused with potential political responses, every brand image and messaging change will be examined through a filter of a cultural lens.
Expect Brand Controversy With Brand Change
Controversy will come for a brand, particularly as time makes a brand's messaging and image cherished among customers. Good marketers will know how to grow a message, deepen a brand’s relevance and serve more people than it ever has.
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