One of the unique and pleasant aspects of writing for American Greatness is that it allows its columnists to compose the titles/headlines that appear above their columns. Most publications don’t do that. A copy editor writes the headline and slaps it on the piece, sometimes with unintended results. Readers tend to judge a column by its title, even more than they judge a book by its cover—and the latter is the cliché of all clichés for a reason. I can’t tell you the number of times over the years that I’ve seen readers upset with a columnist (or even a reporter) about something he didn’t write and over which he had no control, all because a copy editor got creative or tried to be clever or took too many liberties with the content of a column. That’s not usually a problem here at American Greatness.
I point this out today for a reason, namely, because I’m going to need you to bear with me for a second. I wrote the headline/title on this column, and so, I know what it says. I also know that what you’re about to read may seem to contradict that headline. Actually, it contradicts the headline directly. But as I say, hang with me for a bit.
So, the new Cracker Barrel logo redesign is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter. Sure, the new logo is bland. It’s uninteresting. It disconnects the company from its history. And it was almost certainly the result of a collaboration between unimaginative Cracker Barrel executives who are disengaged from their company’s customer base and equally unimaginative outside consultants who have probably never eaten at one of the restaurants, much less talked to its patrons. The redesign will appeal to almost no one and will do nothing to help the company. But then…so what? It’s just a logo, after all. Who cares? In the grand scheme of things, it’s hardly worth the outrage. If it hadn’t been pointed out on social media, and if a handful of conservative influencers hadn’t stirred up indignation over the change, then 99.99% of the people in the country never would have noticed it, and even those who did wouldn’t have allowed it to raise their blood pressure. The bottom line is that in and of itself, the Cracker Barrel logo redesign is a non-story. The very idea that anyone should care about it is just more “boob bait for Bubbas,” as the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say about overhyped Clinton scandals.
Of course, there’s a reason I put those four words—“in and of itself”—in italics. In and of itself, the logo does not matter. In a vacuum, it’s irrelevant. But we don’t exist in a vacuum, and major corporate rebranding efforts signified by a logo redesign rarely, if ever, occur “in and of themselves.” In most cases, such rebranding efforts are indicative of a change in thinking among corporate executives. Sometimes that change in thinking is animated by the company’s failures or by expectations of future problems. Other times, it’s caused by external factors—an adjustment in the marketplace, for example, or the occurrence of an event that reshapes customers’ perceptions of a brand. All too often lately, however, corporate rebrands and changes in thinking are the result of politics—or, more specifically, of the outsized influence of the political predilections of some executives’ personal political predilections.
The most famous/infamous example of such a politically animated corporate rebrand is, of course, Bud Light’s disastrous attempt to broaden its customer base beyond the “rednecks” its marketing executives loathed. Sure, trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney’s TikTok endorsement of the beer struck the spark that lit the fire, but it was merely a part of a broader effort on the part of the Bud Light team to “rebrand” their product and expand its reach to more respectable customers. Recall that the responsibility for that rebranding fell to Bud Light’s 39-year-old vice president of marketing, who had been hired nine months earlier specifically to remake the brand and rebuild its fanbase. Alissa Gordon Heinerscheid was a graduate of Harvard with an MBA from Wharton. She was young and smart and talented and was determined to move Bud Light away from its history of “fratty and out-of-touch humor” and to make the beer appear more “inclusive…and lighter and brighter and different.” Mulvaney was only a very, very small part of that effort—and yet Mulvaney is almost the only thing anyone remembers about the Bud Light rebrand and its disastrous effect on the company, despite the fact that Heinerscheid and her team gathered all the sticks, stacked them carefully, and mailed the kindling and the match to a more “inclusive” co-conspirator.
Similar things have happened at other companies recently as well. Harley-Davidson, for example, hired German businessman Jochen Zeitz as its CEO in 2020, only to watch him try to “reform” the company and turn it into the world’s foremost “sustainable” motorcycle manufacturer. Zeitz was a true believer—not in Harley and motorcycles, mind you, but in his personal ability to save the world by “rebranding” one of the most iconic names in the American automotive industry and thereby to “fix” capitalism. Sustainability, he said, is “not just a buzzword out there that means little, [but rather, something] you’re translating…into the DNA of what you’re doing in business…in order to really try and redefine the role and purpose of business.” So here again, now we are trying to take on traditional capitalism and try to redefine it.”
Jochen Zeitz announced his intention to step down as the CEO of Harley-Davidson four months ago, just five years after taking the job. The company’s share price today is roughly half of what it was before Zeitz’s comments about sustainability and his drive to rebrand Harley were made public.
Interestingly, the person who made Zeitz’s political corruption of Harley-Davidson public almost two years ago was the filmmaker-turned-political-activist Robby Starbuck. This past Thursday, the day the Cracker Barrel rebrand blew up on social media, Starbuck was back in the spotlight, promising that he has considerable dirt on Cracker Barrel and its executive team. “Oh my goodness,” Starbuck teased. “When you see what we’ve got on Cracker Barrel… Wow. I don’t think anyone knew it was as bad as the stuff we received…. This new stuff I just got is crazy, though. Total capture and wildly out of touch with their core consumer.”
Starbuck also promised to release that information in a video on Friday, but as I write this, it is not yet available. Many of you may, however, see the video before this column is published. In any case, given what we already know about the Cracker Barrel executives, especially their overt pandering to the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights group and one of the most aggressive politicizers of American business, I fully expect Robby’s oppo-dump to be just as “crazy” as he says. I also expect that it will serve as proof that those executives were not doing what they were hired to do, that they violated their fiduciary duties to the company’s shareholders in an effort to enact their personal political preferences.
If that’s true, then Cracker Barrel shareholders and customers will have more than ample cause to be incensed. The rest of us—those of us who wish to see business and capital markets insulated from political activism and for corporate executives to return to their traditional fiduciary responsibilities—will be justified in our frustration as well. The logo redesign will be another example of the tip of the proverbial iceberg, the visible sign of behind-the-scenes political machinations destroying a company while also destroying its shareholders’ wealth.
If it’s not true—if, by some strange stroke of fate, the logo redesign was just a logo redesign—then the outrage will subside, and everyone will go back to life as normal, grumbling at the Cracker Barrel sign only when they’re in the mood for some pancakes.
My suspicion, however, is that Shakespeare’s Antonio was correct and that the past is, indeed, prologue, meaning that Thursday’s outrage at Cracker Barrel will prove more than justified.