The kind of manager to reach for the kind of rebrand covered here, rarely appreciates what firms need to keep what they already have and even less to get more and keep it. They are in a hurry.
The quickest way is to cut costs. Such measures include cutting customer-service, firing non-flashy employees, instituting measures that make running the firm convenient for employees and not for customers, adding product features management likes and charge customers for those bright ideas. Think of MS software. The push is 'Change something, to boost eps'. Making cost and financial changes is the easiest thing in the world--any dope can do it and for a while look like a hero.
Might as well sell off assets and liquidate, then where would the CEO work? Oh! How about getting rid of nearly everything, but keep a PO Box open and ask the public to send regular checks there? Ideal, if you can make it work. IF!
Firms exist to satisfy customers with a good or service that customers both need and want. Many firms must also compete with other firms for customers to satisfy.
Firms have to make a profit, but profit is a residual--what's left after costs. Profit is a requirement of survival not the purpose of survival. Think like this. Do you breathe to live or breathe to live? Firms are not in business to make a profit, nor in business to make losses either. Too many losses spell doom.
The dirt-floor truth is without customers firms cannot exist. Satisfying and keeping a customer is easier and cheaper than getting a disappointed customer back. Start losing customers and the end could be near.
Contrary to Harvard Business School, my old school, the order of priorities is not: Stockholders, management, employees, then customers.
The order of priorities is customers, employees, managers, then stockholders. Stockholders of firms that follow those priorities end up with plenty. Unless a firm has a near-monopoly, firms that ignore those priorities stagnate then die.
3d sentence of para 5 should read: 'Do you breathe to live or live to breathe?'
We live to do many things, but breathing is not a conscious aim unless we meditate or sb. means to drown us. Otherwise, we must breathe unthinking, to pursue other aims needing aware thought.
I bet the CEO and CMO of Cracker Barrel have MBAs as most companies require for roles like this. That’s why everything is being reduced to the same strategies and tactics—it’s all essentially the same archetypes. It’s all the same playbook. maybe hiring “proven” leaders is actually riskier than it used to be these days.
I am a big city boy well versed in sophisticated restaurants but when I am traveling I frequently stop at Cracker Barrel and Bob Evans restaurants. They are fun and friendly for Christ’s sake. The new version is totally lacking in character and charm.
Risk/reward ratio is a good abstraction to use if estimated realistically. But the input-numbers exist nowhere in reality. They surely do not brood like omnipresences in the sky awaiting mortal divination. Same as with supply- and demand-curves.
Know of a single manager who uses those? They do not know demand- or supply-schedules. AT BEST managers know their products' prevalent market-price and those products' average costs. Never their marginal cost and marginal revenue.
I agree with you RE "blandscapes" (love that lol!) but marketing did that. Yes, PMCs share the blame and might have been the brains behind it, but marketing was the tool that helped accomplish it. Woke stuff was sold to the general public via marketing. So letting the marketing industrial complex off the hook for this stuff you mention is, imo, not too far off from a "just following orders" defense.
Btw, what funny about the old Cracker Barrel logo is that you didn't even have to read the words to know what it was. Just the shape and color scheme alone were enough to know. But when you're zooming by a sign on an interstate at 80 mph, that new logo could be a lot of things, and there are some other places that have logos that look kinda similar.
When the incentive shifts from “what could go spectacularly right?” to “how do I make sure it’s not my fault if things go wrong?”, you guarantee mediocrity. The goal isn’t to win, but to avoid (i.e. not lose) the “wrong” way. That’s why companies hire McKinsey: not for solutions, but for a scapegoat when the inevitable problems pop up. Modernity is fickle and more fragile than ever because it's cover your ass all the way down. Unfortunately, safety is not strategy; it’s just the slow death of upside.
I may not like Cracker Barrel's new logo, but I do like the new railing and the new door pictured above. More ornate is not always more beautiful. The old railing, door, and balcony are so much harder to clean and keep looking nice! You call the new designs "flat." I call them "sleek."
What's funny about this is we all watched Mad Men, the rare show that centers around ideas/creativity/bold thinking/brands. I rewatched it recently and was struck by how much of the show centered around the business of helping companies grow.
This is how brands die: Guardians of Decay neuter risk, Merchants of Certainty sell the PowerPoint cure, and you end up with New Coke instead of “Just Do It.” Bureaucrats don’t build brands, they bury them.
So when it comes to logos, I feel like the digital age meant logos needed to be legible at scale on mobile.
So brands basically moved towards streamlined, simple logos with sans serif type that could be easily legible when minimized down.
And now, yeah, I think people realize this style is getting, well, really fucking boring. Cracker Barrel is just one example of a larger phenomenon - exactly as you pointed out.
But just watch - I think the pendulum will swing back over the next decade.
No, most of the backlash is political and about some strange perception of one logo as more "woke" than others. The stock price crashed for the same reason Microstrategy trades at a high multiple to the value of Bitcoin and why AMC, GameStop, etc had big bumps: investors who play the stock market like a game.
Companies go through eras of design trends and we're at a minimalist one now. The old Cracker Barrel logo was hard to read from the highway, and most of their locations are along highways in the Midwest. There are a lot of good reasons for the new design, which isn't better or worse than the old. There will be new trends in the future which move in other directions.
Instead, the idea that nothing can change - that everything has to stay exactly as it is - is the toxic perspective of the modern conservative. Any change is "woke", and the world need to be preserved as it is for all time. It's a really sad state to see, as if change was scary.
No one cares about logos, except when outrage is manufactured by people with political aims or trying to make money off the rage.
They *could have easily* done a better job simplifying the logo while retaining some of the soul. They didn't succeed here read - thousands of threads and media stories were nearly all negative and this is x-political beliefs and networks.
It's def not politics, it's aesthetic. Even a friend who is very liberal SVP at one of the largest agencies in America talks about this, that bland-fication is simply bad marketing
No logo change should cause a company's stock to tank. Abject failure and honestly marketing malpractice. No reason to defend this one. It's just poor design.
Things can def change but you have to evolve while retaining aesthetic.
There is no logo change that affects the company at all until others make a point of it. Honestly, I like the new logo a lot more than the old one. We all have different taste, but the logo itself doesn't really matter in the end. People hated the Airbnb logo when it came out but then they found something else to be mad about.
This case is different because it became political so it ramped up the political rage machine to amplify it. Otherwise no one is talking about Cracker Barrel, because no one cares.
The kind of manager to reach for the kind of rebrand covered here, rarely appreciates what firms need to keep what they already have and even less to get more and keep it. They are in a hurry.
The quickest way is to cut costs. Such measures include cutting customer-service, firing non-flashy employees, instituting measures that make running the firm convenient for employees and not for customers, adding product features management likes and charge customers for those bright ideas. Think of MS software. The push is 'Change something, to boost eps'. Making cost and financial changes is the easiest thing in the world--any dope can do it and for a while look like a hero.
Might as well sell off assets and liquidate, then where would the CEO work? Oh! How about getting rid of nearly everything, but keep a PO Box open and ask the public to send regular checks there? Ideal, if you can make it work. IF!
Firms exist to satisfy customers with a good or service that customers both need and want. Many firms must also compete with other firms for customers to satisfy.
Firms have to make a profit, but profit is a residual--what's left after costs. Profit is a requirement of survival not the purpose of survival. Think like this. Do you breathe to live or breathe to live? Firms are not in business to make a profit, nor in business to make losses either. Too many losses spell doom.
The dirt-floor truth is without customers firms cannot exist. Satisfying and keeping a customer is easier and cheaper than getting a disappointed customer back. Start losing customers and the end could be near.
Contrary to Harvard Business School, my old school, the order of priorities is not: Stockholders, management, employees, then customers.
The order of priorities is customers, employees, managers, then stockholders. Stockholders of firms that follow those priorities end up with plenty. Unless a firm has a near-monopoly, firms that ignore those priorities stagnate then die.
3d sentence of para 5 should read: 'Do you breathe to live or live to breathe?'
We live to do many things, but breathing is not a conscious aim unless we meditate or sb. means to drown us. Otherwise, we must breathe unthinking, to pursue other aims needing aware thought.
I bet the CEO and CMO of Cracker Barrel have MBAs as most companies require for roles like this. That’s why everything is being reduced to the same strategies and tactics—it’s all essentially the same archetypes. It’s all the same playbook. maybe hiring “proven” leaders is actually riskier than it used to be these days.
I am a big city boy well versed in sophisticated restaurants but when I am traveling I frequently stop at Cracker Barrel and Bob Evans restaurants. They are fun and friendly for Christ’s sake. The new version is totally lacking in character and charm.
Pro tip: check the Risk/Reward ratio before starting.
In this case:
Upside--virtually non-existent
Downside -Stock down 14%
Yeah I mean the market is telling them all they need to know, a logo refresh dropping the stock is a pretty strong signal you've messed up somewhere
Risk/reward ratio is a good abstraction to use if estimated realistically. But the input-numbers exist nowhere in reality. They surely do not brood like omnipresences in the sky awaiting mortal divination. Same as with supply- and demand-curves.
Know of a single manager who uses those? They do not know demand- or supply-schedules. AT BEST managers know their products' prevalent market-price and those products' average costs. Never their marginal cost and marginal revenue.
In this example I think they're pretty straightforward.
Upside: zero
Downside: infinite
I agree with you RE "blandscapes" (love that lol!) but marketing did that. Yes, PMCs share the blame and might have been the brains behind it, but marketing was the tool that helped accomplish it. Woke stuff was sold to the general public via marketing. So letting the marketing industrial complex off the hook for this stuff you mention is, imo, not too far off from a "just following orders" defense.
Btw, what funny about the old Cracker Barrel logo is that you didn't even have to read the words to know what it was. Just the shape and color scheme alone were enough to know. But when you're zooming by a sign on an interstate at 80 mph, that new logo could be a lot of things, and there are some other places that have logos that look kinda similar.
When the incentive shifts from “what could go spectacularly right?” to “how do I make sure it’s not my fault if things go wrong?”, you guarantee mediocrity. The goal isn’t to win, but to avoid (i.e. not lose) the “wrong” way. That’s why companies hire McKinsey: not for solutions, but for a scapegoat when the inevitable problems pop up. Modernity is fickle and more fragile than ever because it's cover your ass all the way down. Unfortunately, safety is not strategy; it’s just the slow death of upside.
basically cheap things are being marketed as “clean” “lean” “elegant” NOT “efficient”. Efficient is 1960.
I may not like Cracker Barrel's new logo, but I do like the new railing and the new door pictured above. More ornate is not always more beautiful. The old railing, door, and balcony are so much harder to clean and keep looking nice! You call the new designs "flat." I call them "sleek."
What's funny about this is we all watched Mad Men, the rare show that centers around ideas/creativity/bold thinking/brands. I rewatched it recently and was struck by how much of the show centered around the business of helping companies grow.
This is how brands die: Guardians of Decay neuter risk, Merchants of Certainty sell the PowerPoint cure, and you end up with New Coke instead of “Just Do It.” Bureaucrats don’t build brands, they bury them.
So when it comes to logos, I feel like the digital age meant logos needed to be legible at scale on mobile.
So brands basically moved towards streamlined, simple logos with sans serif type that could be easily legible when minimized down.
And now, yeah, I think people realize this style is getting, well, really fucking boring. Cracker Barrel is just one example of a larger phenomenon - exactly as you pointed out.
But just watch - I think the pendulum will swing back over the next decade.
You can do this without being boring, and also not everyone needs a mobile app anyway
No, most of the backlash is political and about some strange perception of one logo as more "woke" than others. The stock price crashed for the same reason Microstrategy trades at a high multiple to the value of Bitcoin and why AMC, GameStop, etc had big bumps: investors who play the stock market like a game.
Companies go through eras of design trends and we're at a minimalist one now. The old Cracker Barrel logo was hard to read from the highway, and most of their locations are along highways in the Midwest. There are a lot of good reasons for the new design, which isn't better or worse than the old. There will be new trends in the future which move in other directions.
Instead, the idea that nothing can change - that everything has to stay exactly as it is - is the toxic perspective of the modern conservative. Any change is "woke", and the world need to be preserved as it is for all time. It's a really sad state to see, as if change was scary.
No one cares about logos, except when outrage is manufactured by people with political aims or trying to make money off the rage.
They *could have easily* done a better job simplifying the logo while retaining some of the soul. They didn't succeed here read - thousands of threads and media stories were nearly all negative and this is x-political beliefs and networks.
It's def not politics, it's aesthetic. Even a friend who is very liberal SVP at one of the largest agencies in America talks about this, that bland-fication is simply bad marketing
(https://www.linkedin.com/posts/johnalongcd_cracker-barrel-loses-almost-100-million-activity-7364631554444173312-VpB4).
No logo change should cause a company's stock to tank. Abject failure and honestly marketing malpractice. No reason to defend this one. It's just poor design.
Things can def change but you have to evolve while retaining aesthetic.
There is no logo change that affects the company at all until others make a point of it. Honestly, I like the new logo a lot more than the old one. We all have different taste, but the logo itself doesn't really matter in the end. People hated the Airbnb logo when it came out but then they found something else to be mad about.
This case is different because it became political so it ramped up the political rage machine to amplify it. Otherwise no one is talking about Cracker Barrel, because no one cares.