Cracker Barrel’s inconvenient fact: all the customers who loved its old logo had stopped going to the restaurant

AP Photo/Wyatte Grantham-Philips its namesake barrels that transported soda crackers until boxes replaced them, Cracker Barrel needed to change

Re showed consumers thought the brand fell short of competitors in essential ways, from the quality of the food to value and convenience. “We are not leading in any area

We will change that,” Masino said

But over the past week, Cracker Barrel’s attempted revamp hit a wall

The company saw severe backlash over its plans to modernize and simplify its nostalgic logo – including from President Donald Trump. “I don’t the changes

I mean it’s always been Cracker Barrel it is, so I’d for it to stay it is,” customer Sid Leist said during a visit to a Cracker Barrel in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on Tuesday

By that evening, Cracker Barrel had reversed course and said its old logo would remain

It features an overall-clad man – said to represent Uncle Herschel, a relative of Cracker Barrel’s founder – leaning on a barrel, with the words “Old Country Store” underneath

Investors cheered the move

That was even higher than its closing price on Aug. 15, before it announced the new logo

Masino introduced d items, Hashbrown Casserole Shepherd’s Pie, to increase Cracker Barrel’s dinnertime traffic

She also started remodeling the company’s dark, antique-filled restaurants, lightening the walls and installing more comfortable seating

The changes appeared to be helping

Cracker Barrel’s fiscal third quarter, which May 2, was the fourth consecutive quarter of same-store sales growth for the company

Same-store sales, a key metric for restaurants, measures sales at locations open at least one year

Logo misstep Richard Wilke, a former executive at the brand consultancy Lippincott who helped lead rebrands for companies Delta Air Lines and Walmart, said Cracker Barrel’s existing logo is too detailed and fussy for the digital age, when companies have to think how their brand appears in a smartphone app

But Wilke said Cracker Barrel’s new logo, featuring just the company’s name in brown letters on a gold background, lacked character

The logo’s rollout also seemed an afterthought

In a press release new fall items released Aug. 18, the company mentioned the new logo in the fourth paragraph

The apach Walmart took in 2008 vides a better model for a successful rebrand, according to Wilke

Walmart wanted to broaden its appeal, especially to shoppers in urban areas

It redesigned stores, slowly adding a new blue-and-yellow color scheme and yellow asterisk symbol

It trained employees on the meaning behind its new slogan, “ money. better.” After a year or more, the company finally introduced its new logo, which added the yellow asterisk and dropped the hyphen from Wal-Mart in order to de-emphasize the discount term “Mart.” “The logo change was almost a natural conclusion to this multi-year transformation,” Wilke said. “I suspect that if we did it in the same sequence as Cracker Barrel, we would have gotten the same noise.” Nostalgia factor Cracker Barrel acknowledged Monday that it should have done a better job with the new logo’s rollout

The company said it should have emphasized all the things that would remain the same Cracker Barrel restaurants: the rocking chairs on the front porches, fireplaces in the dining rooms and vintage Americana and antiques scattered throughout

The company said it would also continue to honor Uncle Herschel on its and on items sold in the country-style stores attached to its restaurants

But it was too late, and Cracker Barrel pulled its new logo the next day

Next steps Thomas Murphy, a fessor of practice at Clark University School of , said returning to the original logo was a “positive course correction” given the intensity of fans’ response

Now, Murphy said, Cracker Barrel should reinforce the message that it’s not moving away from its values or heritage

Murphy said Cracker Barrel can continue to “refresh” its stores, making them brighter and more welcoming to younger customers

But it doesn’t really need to “rebrand,” he said, which would indicate a bigger change in direction or purpose

Wilke agrees that Cracker Barrel should stick with the old logo but continue to revamp its restaurants in the short term

Eventually, the company will have to adopt a simpler logo, he said, but it should design one that retains more of the brand’s heritage

Cracker Barrel caught heat not only from Donald Trump Jr. but from the president himself

On Tuesday morning, Trump said via Truth Social that Cracker Barrel “should go back to the old logo, admit a mistake based on customer response (the ultimate Poll), and manage the company better than ever before.” Later, Trump celebrated Cracker Barrel’s decision to drop its new logo

Wilke said he wishes both Republicans and Democrats would stay out of brand decisions Cracker Barrel’s

Rebrands are almost always trying to attract new customers without alienating old ones, he said. “This isn’t a political story,” he said. “If politicians now turn every company logo dedate into a debate being ‘woke’ or ‘anti-woke,’ we are headed into a damaging new era for corporate branding.” ___ AP Journalist Sophie Bates contributed from Vicksburg, Mississippi

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