Adventures in Rebranding

Two seemingly unconnected things from last week that I couldn’t help connecting, however tangentially, both of which have political valence for many people but not necessarily for me:

Item: Cracker Barrel CEO rolls out minimalist update to restaurant chain, is jeered and hooted (and stock marketed) into a reversal.

Item: Dr James Dobson, Christian psychologist and founder of Focus on the Family, dies aged 89.

I’ll start with the latter. Dr Dobson was a staple of my fundamentalist upbringing. My mom listened to him every day in the car on WRAF (along with Tony Evans and Larry Burkett, the Dave Ramsey before Dave Ramsey), we got regular mail from Focus on the Family, and my parents read his books. He held great authority in our circles.

But much more important—to me, as a kid—than anything related to childrearing, Christian psychology, and the political advocacy associated with Dr Dobson was Adventures in Odyssey, the Focus on the Family-produced radio drama that aired every Saturday morning. Briefly, this half-hour show took place in a small middle-American town with a cast of colorful characters, adults and kids. Well-written, richly imagined, moralistic without being preachy, and kid-friendly without being condescending, it was also fun.

An early episode (from 1990!) that has always stuck with me: Mr Phillips, a big-city consultant, swoops into Odyssey offering his services to its small family-owned businesses. What he does, it gradually becomes clear, is strictly rebranding. He takes a local convenience store, gives it a snappy new name, and hands the owner an invoice. Ditto the curmudgeonly window cleaner, whose one-man janitorial services are rebranded as “Hygienic Maintenance and Engineering.” The consultant finally runs aground at Whit’s End, the local ice cream parlor and arcade run by the show’s moral center, WWII vet and inventor John Avery Whittaker, who sees through the charade and won’t buy in.

This story offered a very simple lesson: changing nomenclature doesn’t change substance. Spin, exaggeration, and slick branding live right next door to lying.

This episode also accurately characterized a specific kind of hustler. Mr Phillips is not from Odyssey, doesn’t understand the town or its people, and doesn’t care. This is not just my hillbilly prejudice against outsiders speaking—it is entirely possible for someone to move to a new place and work with the locals and become part of their community, but Mr Phillips’s project is fundamentally dishonest and exploitive. The businesses he solicits are objects to him, to be “improved” according to a formula, with little effort on his part and no actual changes to beyond new signage, before extracting payment and moving on.

I’ve thought of this story many times over the years. (It’s probably a key part of my lifelong suspicion of word games.) I thought of it again last week when the Cracker Barrel kerfuffle broke. It’s probably clear why.

Though the story almost instantly took on political spin (succinctly parodied here), I don’t think the Cracker Barrel rebrand and redesign is really about politics. By far the most insightful thing I read during the whole debacle was this piece pointing out the CEO’s long history of hopping from company to company, serving some executive role for sometimes less than a year—a sort of C-suite gig economy. The rebrand and the boring, deracinated, beige redesign of the restaurants isn’t woke, it’s the result of a mercenary executive who, like Adventures in Odyssey’s Mr Phillips, has no history with the company, no understanding of its appeal, no connection with its customer base, and no incentive to ensure its long-term success.

And—more importantly, and the real story as far as I’m concerned—her much ballyhooed update does nothing to change the actual business. Cracker Barrel has actual problems, the kind that sink restaurant chains: declining quality in both service and food. A minimalist logo and a truckload of beige shiplap, a superficial update in the name of “relevance” designed to hypothetically draw in some theoretical new demographic, is a corporate version of the same con Mr Phillips is pulling in Odyssey.

I hate the aesthetics of the rebrand, but I hate even more the problem it represents. It’s culture-wide, as that Substack piece makes clear. (Another recent example: Goodreads got a new logo but no improvement to its clunky design.) As long as inconstancy and gun-for-hire practices are accepted and our culture continues to value using language to conjure more than the hard work of change and improvement—in short, as long as real life is treated as a marketing project—it will continue.