Three lessons we won’t learn from the Cracker Barrel crack-up

Doomed to repeat

Jeffrey Denny

Remember the Great Cracker Barrel Logo Scandal of 2025?

We won’t. We’ll also never heed the key takeaways:

1. Ignore internet outrage over internet outrage

Are we still doing this? Someone does something. Stupid idiots are outraged and post stupid, idiotic opinions. Other stupid idiots are outraged at them and post their stupid, idiotic backlash.

This triggers the original and other stupid idiots to prove they’re stupid idiots by responding. And ‘round and ‘round goes the sad grade-school grammar, spelling, syntax, thinking, and reasoning.

The real news media, struggling for the money and talent needed for real journalism, cover and feed the “controversy.” The Trump official state media digs up a way to attack the real news media.

Then Trump cannonballs in, sending a tidal wave of controversy and coverage that swamps all media. Opinionators who observe the battle from on high come down and tell everyone how to think about it. And call one another stupid idiots.

All this sound and fury when only 9% of adult Americans post about political or social issues, Pew Research found, while 70% never or rarely post. Why do we give stupid idiots so much power over us? Like in the 2016 and 2024 elections?

2. Branding demands gut sense, not just data

Think back to Pepsi’s Kendal Jenner ad defusing a staged police-protestor standoff by giving a cop a soft drink. The internet backlash was so furious that Pepsi pulled the ad in one day. And nobody at the company noticed the ad was deeply offensive? (See also: “35 Examples of Branding Fails.”)

Like with Cracker Barrel, rebranding disasters often involve slick versions of classic logos that people know and relate to, but achieve the opposite effects. And no, they don’t deliberately fail for clever PR brand awareness, not when the backlash erases millions of dollars in market cap.

I’ve been involved in rebranding exercises for two Fortune 500 corporations with heritage brands. Major companies like them spend big money and time on top brand consultants, market-research firms, and meeting hours to revive or pump brand value, i.e., profits.

So when rebranding fails, especially quickly, spectacularly, and with enough damage that countless work and money are dumped overnight like fast fashion, you have to ask what happened inside the firm.

Does the company culture squelch questions about the naked emperor? Are execs afraid to challenge the expert consultants they’re paying?

Or are companies so dependent on market research that they let it override obvious issues and gut sense? The culprit could be anxious risk management. Gut sense is hard to defend when things go wrong, while the data is the data — what can you do?

Cracker Barrel CEO Julie Felss Masino claimed its market research blessed the rebranded logo. But did her researchers ask the obvious question for an obvious MAGA brand — what would MAGA think?

3. Don’t go chasing the youth waterfall

Cracker Barrel pursued this traditional holy grail over the cliff. Three problems with doing that now:

1. America has only 23 million 18–24 Gen Z compared to 200 million people over 25. And 73 million are Boomers, the restaurant’s key demographic. They’re also big Trump backers and online rageaholics. Send them out to pasture for entitled, progressive youth who are skeptical of work, capitalism, and traditional America, and wait for the internet firestorm.
2. Gen Z is the most self- and brand- (and self-brand) obsessed generation ever. It’s also the most brand-fickle, as paid TikTok and Instagram influencers, the new used-car salesmen, constantly shift trends so millions of today’s youth can re-express their unique individual identities every other day. Remember the 2023 Stanley water tumbler craze? A New York Times Millennial fashion writer turbocharged and politically gendered the “social-media-famous” product with the clickbait-y “The Sisterhood of the Stanley Tumbler.” Backlash ensued as the cup got popular. Now the Times extols a new trend: Gen Z is stressed out about “Too Many Trends!” The very ones that they’re driving.
3. Most of all, who at Cracker Barrel didn’t get that Gen Z would never hit the highway for its delicious Chicken n’ Dumplins with a side of wooden peg solitaire? Talk about giving cringe …

If you’re outraged by the latest internet outrage, heed Mark Twain’s warning about the New England weather: Wait a minute, it’ll change. Even if the outrage loop won’t.

Jeffrey Denny is a Washington writer.