This is the original Cracker Barrel logo:
This is the new Cracker Barrel logo:
Yikes.
The company paid PR firms Prophet, Viral Nation and Blue Engine a ton of money to come up with this redesign.
They obviously had two goals here:
Modernize the brand
Make a logo that can scale on different devices (readable/recognizable on mobile)
If you view their decision through the lens of the second goal it KIND OF makes sense…the original logo is too busy to work as a thumbnail on a social media profile on a tiny phone screen. If it’s text-only, it’s much easier to read/comprehend the brand name.
The real disaster is goal #1, which shouldn’t even have been a goal to begin with.
It’s almost as bad as the Jaguar rebrand.
The people who work at these corporations and agencies are completely out of touch with the zeitgeist.
Old vs. new
During times of uncertainty, people long for the past. When a civilization or humanity-at-large is optimistic and confident, people look towards the future.
How you should position your brand:
Uncertain times: nostalgia/natural/vintage
Confident times: futuristic/artificial/high-tech
The current spirit of the times is obviously weighted towards the uncertainty side of the spectrum.
An example of the opposite would be the 1950’s and 1960’s, when it was a good idea for brands to make their products seem futuristic.
In 2025 all brands should read the room and do the opposite aka lean into nostalgia.
I already wrote about why in a previous article, so no need to rehash it here:
Nostalgic Vibes FTW
I stumbled upon this image showing the ‘evolution’ (devolution) of Jaguar’s logo:
Why CB made such a terrible decision
The Cracker Barrel logo rebrand is an example of the perils of relying too much on The Data™ .
I’m sure the agencies they hired gave the Cracker Barrel team fancy PowerPoint presentations with clear, logical, and solid data with tons of numbers and fancy charts that “proved” that consumers wanted a modern rebrand.
The problem? Data doesn’t mean anything.
People who are good with numbers can massage and finesse them to get any result they want.
Numbers lie. At a bare minimum, they don’t tell the whole story.
If the executives had any common sense they would have told the consultants to fuck off.
But they didn’t.
A gut feeling is the most powerful instinct a business owner can develop. It should never be ignored.
The powers-that-be at Cracker Barrel ignored theirs (anyone could instantly look at that redesign and know it was terrible) and paid the price.
You can’t turn your brain off just because you have data and the tools to analyze it.
The reason you as a human still exist in the economy is because of your ability to make a judgment call. If there was never a need for intuition then every business in America would be successfully run by bots.
Your ability to say “fuck the damn data, we’re not doing that because it’s stupid and that’s final” is an extreme value-add to both your business and human civilization.
There’s a massive shortage of people who have the balls to not only think for themselves in the privacy of their own skull but actually stick their neck out there and make a stand on something.
If you’re one of those “I’m a data guy so if the numbers check out let’s roll with it” types of people then you are USELESS in the modern economy.
The world doesn’t need any more data weenies. We’re saturated with them. Choosing to be one just makes you another drop in an already overflowing bucket.
Be different. Use your brain.
Everyone is afraid to stand out
There’s another, more esoteric reason behind the redesign.
Stuff like this keeps happening.
Businesses are choosing to destroy their unique charm and change their design aesthetic to Deliberately Soulless.
And it’s not just Corporate America.
Society as a whole is becoming more bland and boring and colorless.
Go to any parking lot and look at the cars. It’s a sea of grey, black, white, and silver.
Average parking lot in the 2020s:
Average parking lot in the 1970s:
The market share for grayscale cars increases every year.
You can see the same thing with fashion and especially interior design (millennial grey).
Everyone is afraid to stand out.
I think this is a byproduct of social media culture. Social media makes it feel like everyone is judging you. For a lot of people, the safest route to take is to be as bland and boring and unremarkable as possible.
Getting made fun of doesn’t sting as bad if you weren’t event trying to begin with.
You would think that highly-paid corporate leaders would be immune to this or at least wouldn’t let it impact their decisions.
But that’s not the way human nature works.
If your entire life revolves around your desire to not be judged, it’s going to leak into everything.
When a bunch of corporate types are sitting around the real or metaphorical conference table making design decisions, they will reject anything that has personality.
“No, [x group] will hate that”.
“Too many colors, it’s going to scare people away”.
“Nope, Gen Z will that design, it’s too old-fashioned”.
Every single person is petrified because if they stick their neck out there and it fails, they’ll be the one to take the blame.
So they finally settle on the one thing that they think won’t offend anyone: bland, colorless minimalism with zero personality.
But the problem with trying to please everyone is that you end up pleasing no one.
Love and hate are two sides of the same coin.
If you want to make something that people love, you’re going to have to accept that other people will hate it.
Cracker Barrel has never appealed to me. I’ve eaten there twice in my life with the last time being about 15 years ago.
I think the interior design is hokey AF and the food is terrible.
But that’s fine because I’m not their target audience.
OG Cracker Barrel appeals to an older, rural crowd who aren’t adventurous in their tastes. It’s basically their version of fine dining. They love it more than anything in the world and (I shit you not) actually look forward to eating there.
The company should have doubled down on the rustic vibes to appeal to them instead of trying to bland themselves down into mediocre minimalness.
The End.
If you try and please everyone, you end up pleading no one.