Why Cracker Barrel’s disastrous rebrand was inevitable

What’s going on with Cracker Barrel?

The restaurant chain just rolled out a full rebrand, courtesy of CEO and president Julie Felss Masino. It’s so ambitious that the rebrand itself even has a name: “All the More,” a perfectly vague and nauseating brand for a perfectly vague and nauseating rebrand.

Every decision must be backed up by consultants, data firms, and PR agencies so that when things flop, no one at the top can be blamed.

Here’s the old logo:

All those little details — the barrel, the old white guy, the dark-yellow pinto-bean-shaped background, the phrase “Old Country Store” — have been thrown out in favor of something with all the charm of a fintech logo:

And it’s not just the logo. The company has redesigned the inside of the restaurants, too, from their trademark cluttered, homey feel, with tchotchkes and old pictures and fishing reels …

… to something “cleaner” with white walls and minimal decor. All the little quirks and nuances that endeared the brand to consumers in the first place — gone. What used to have an idiosyncratic, country-store feel now resembles a generic $14-per-taco shop in Austin.

Refinement racket

There’s nothing groundbreaking about this makeover, of course. It’s a prime example of what wriiter Paul Skallas (better known online as LindyMan) calls “refinement culture:” the endless corporate drive to shave away quirks, details, and character until everything looks the same — flat, safe, and soulless.

There’s also nothing surprising about the backlash. People don’t like refinement culture. Burberry learned this back in 2018, when the company went from this …

… to this:

Not only did it swap the pleasantly ornate logo for something in a blandly utilitarian, sans serif font, the company completely jettisoned the image of the knight — a reference to the brand’s beginning as a purveyor of equestrian apparel.

This “new look” lasted all of five years before Burberry came to its senses and returned to what was already working.

Tone-deaf functionaries

Why didn’t Felss Masino learn from Burberry? Or, for that matter, from Bud Light’s more recent Dylan Mulvaney fiasco?

As for Bud Light, it’s likely that Felss Masino didn’t think she was making the same mistake as her counterpart at Anheuser-Busch; obviously she hasn’t done anything as egregiously misguided as pushing “trans” on an audience with no interest whatsoever in seeing a narcissistic gay man pretend he’s a girl.

But at bottom, Felss Masino exhibits the same tone-deafness — a clear inability or unwillingness to understand her customers and the direction of mainstream culture in general.

So what did Cracker Barrel think it was doing? To answer that, you need to understand the function of people like Felss Masino.

She doesn’t create anything. Never hath she shifted a zero into a one. She is a managerial bureaucrat who just goes from one company to the next.

Not only is she a managerial bureaucrat, she’s not a particularly good one. Cracker Barrel is not the kind of “sexy” brand that people like Felss Masino aspire to run. And you can see her disdain for Cracker Barrel and its customers in her indifference to what makes the brand work.

Deleting the details

Obviously she didn’t set out to tank the brand. Cracker Barrel hasn’t been doing great financially, so most likely she brought in a consultant — consultants being the main drivers of refinement culture — who pointed out how inefficient it was to maintain this complicated logo and interior design.

I imagine the pitch was something like: “Here’s your line-item budget. If you can cut down your design costs by 10%, you’ll save the company $25 million a year.”

That’s what consultants do, while at the same time justifying their own existence. They want to get you to take money that could go to building your business and spend it on their endless little pare-downs. Until you’re left with no details. And culture is details.

Which is why leaders with an actual vision don’t use consultants. Apple founder Steve Jobs famously disdained them.

Brand flakes

But very few leaders have vision. A while back I went to dinner with the CEO of a famous consumer packaged goods brand. She had all the right credentials: Ivy League education, high-profile experience in the industry.

It’s what she didn’t have that was notable: even the remotest interest in the product she oversaw. There was not one thing in her home — let alone in her conversation — to indicate her role.

And I realized it was because she is excelling at her job. Which is essentially to act as a bureaucrat maintaining the status quo. These aren’t companies — they’re bureaus. What’s Cracker Barrel to them but the Bureau of Cheap White People Highway Rest-Stop Slop?

Look at Felss Masino’s resume. She’s been at Cracker Barrel for a little over two years. Before that, a five-year stint at Taco Bell, a couple of months at Mattel, three years at Sprinkles Cupcakes. Her longest job was one of her earliest: She spent 12 years rising in the ranks at Starbucks until she became a top marketing executive.

Camel by committee

It’s at this point that the job changes become much more frequent, and that’s no accident. Felss Masino no doubt had to live and breathe Starbucks during her long ascent there, but now that she’s “made it,” she can enjoy life as one of the many interchangeable female CEOs whose only job is take whatever brand she’s in charge of, refine it down to its most efficient version, and maximize its value for the corporate regime.

Yes, sometimes that means pushing through “woke,” LGBT nonsense, but ultimately that’s just a means to an end. The most important qualification of kommissars like Felss Masino is their mastery of CYA.

CYA, short for cover your a**, is a time-honored philosophy of dysfunctional organizations, often associated with its corollary, s**t flows downhill. And marketing today is dominated by CYA culture. Every decision must be backed up by consultants, data firms, and PR agencies so that when things flop, no one at the top can be blamed. Or even in the middle, if you’re good enough at CYA.

That’s why Cracker Barrel didn’t hire one visionary agency. It hired three mediocre ones — Blue Engine, Prophet, and Viral Nation — each surely providing slides, jargon, and “proof” that the rebrand was genius. The result is exactly what you’d expect: a camel built by committee.

New and improved

It doesn’t have to be this way. Back in the 1990s, when I grew up, brands took big marketing risks. They were willing to commit to a strong point of view.

It didn’t always work, but when it did, it made everyday life a little more pleasant. Unless you want to live somewhere completely off the grid, you will be regularly exposed to advertising; it’s indispensable to the innovation and consumer choice we all enjoy. What people in the ad business used to understand is that advertising doesn’t have to be ugly or lowest-common-denominator. Look at old ads by Nike, or Apple, or even McDonald’s — ads that dared to strive for beauty and inspiration.

What changed is the kind of people who go into advertising. What used to be a scrappy, male-dominated field, as in “Mad Men,” is now dominated by overeducated women.

Women’s work

Let me make the standard, tiresome disclaimer: I’ve worked with many talented and funny women marketers. The problem is how the inverted sex ratio changes the business as a whole. Women, generally speaking, just don’t have the same competitive, ego-driven, risk-taking nature as men. And when you’ve spent $250,000 on your education, you’re not about to jeopardize your investment by taking big swings.

This new ecosystem rewards traits that are more traditionally female: presentability, agreeableness, and keeping things tidy and organized. It requires leaders who are fluent in inoffensive, trying-to-please-everybody marketing gobbledygook. Like this quote from Cracker Barrel Chief Marketing Officer Sarah Moore:

We believe in the goodness of country hospitality, a spirit that has always defined us. Our story hasn’t changed. Our values haven’t changed. With “All the More,” we’re honoring our legacy while bringing fresh energy, thoughtful craftsmanship, and heartfelt hospitality to our guests this fall.

As someone with more than a decade of ad industry experience, I’ve been neck-deep in this kind of soul-killing gibberish for years. But there is a bright side.

You gotta believe

If you have the drive and the ambition, the CYA-ification of marketing represents a huge opportunity. Small, upstart brands are better positioned than ever to cut through the noise — provided they’re not afraid to defy business as usual.

That’s exactly why I founded my agency, WILL.

I suppose this is the point at which I’m supposed to issue some faux-humble disclaimer like “shameless self-promotion!” But screw that. Why would I feel any shame? I believe in WILL, and that’s why I work so relentlessly to build it. And I believe just as wholeheartedly in the brands we help.

This says less about my virtue than it does about my sheer pragmatism. For anyone wanting to escape the system-wide managed decline afflicting Cracker Barrel and countless other organizations, sincere, deeply held belief in your mission isn’t optional — it’s the only way out.

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