What makes a brand? Cracker Barrel found out the hard way that its interpretation was vastly different from what some customers thought. Last week, the restaurant and country store chain, which specializes in homestyle Southern cuisine, debuted a rebranded logo. The former logo, featuring a drawing of an old man—known as “Uncle Herschel”—leaning up against a barrel next to the words “Cracker Barrel,” had been simplified to the “Cracker Barrel” in black type in the center of a yellow hexagon with rounded corners. The biggest change was that the old man and barrel were gone.

The new logo was part of Cracker Barrel’s strategic transformation plan, put together last year with the goal of increasing profitability through driving the brand’s relevancy. Some restaurant locations have been redesigned to cut back on the previous country clutter aesthetic, and the new logo was another part of that evolution. CEO Julie Masino told Good Morning America that public feedback to the remodeled locations had been “overwhelmingly positive,” and that people liked what they were doing.

And then the new logo dropped like a bomb, igniting an unexpected firestorm of online criticism—especially among conservatives. The logo without “Uncle Herschel” was decried as “woke,” though Forbes senior contributor Dani DiPlacido writes that many people were unclear about what was “woke” about the change. After all, many brands have recently done similar modern streamlining of their logos.

President Donald Trump also weighed in, posting to Truth Social on Tuesday that the company should “admit a mistake based on customer response (the ultimate Poll), and manage the company better than ever before.” He wrote that the company could earn “a Billion Dollars worth of free publicity if they play their cards right.”

By evening, Cracker Barrel announced it would stick with the old logo featuring “Uncle Herschel,” which received praise from both Trump and investors. Its stock rose more than 6% after the announcement—though it’s worth noting that the company’s stock price had actually been higher on average last month.

Through the controversy, Cracker Barrel perhaps already got the $1 billion in free publicity that Trump predicted. But the real question is what it means for the long term. Will all of the people who loudly protested the new logo patronize Cracker Barrel more often? Will younger consumers feel put off by a restaurant featuring an old man on its signs? When all is said and done, Cracker Barrel’s business is its restaurant, which hinges more on food and experience than the logo on a sign. The restaurant is making changes to those two things as well, and neither has inspired such a passionate response. Even before the controversy, Cracker Barrel was making its way back from a slow period, reporting the fourth consecutive quarter of positive growth in comparable location sales in June, when it also upgraded its outlook for the fiscal year for the second time. It remains to be seen whether logo controversy will give it a bigger bump.

Customer experience is important in both restaurants and the digital space. When you’re working online, AI can be a powerful tool to enhance CX, but there needs to be some thought behind it. I talked to Anil Chakravarthy, president of Digital Experience Business at Adobe, about how to make it work in your industry. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.

In spring 2024, Congress and former President Joe Biden came together to stand against TikTok, the short video social app owned by China’s ByteDance, proclaiming it a national security threat that gives China a wealth of data on Americans and a tool to spy on them.

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