When rebranding goes wrong
Every few months, at least in design and brand circles, it seems like for two weeks all anyone is talking about is a rebrand gone wrong. Jaguar. X. Max (formerly HBO Max). Cracker Barrel (formerly Cracker Barrel... And now Cracker Barrel again). Sometimes it even becomes a national conversation about the new logo: The design is terrible. Here’s how we would have done it differently. It’s political. It’s boring. It makes no sense. They’ve lost their personality. They’ve lost themselves.
This week, the Cracker Barrel rebrand became the latest example of this cycle of outrage – and in a rare move, Cracker Barrel actually gave in to the outcry and announced it would be changing back to the old Cracker Barrel logo, complete with ornate type and folksy mascot. The Cracker Barrel rebrand is just the latest example of brands failing to properly manage change, engage audiences, and understand their positioning. And here’s the thing – it’s not about the design. The new (or old new) Cracker Barrel logo was a good design, informed by solid design choices and practical necessities for digital usage. But a brand is about so much more than design.
For small to mid-size brands, you most likely don’t have to worry about being part of the cultural conversation in the same way as these top brands do (the White House probably isn’t going to comment on your new logo). There’s a spotlight and a polarization that is almost impossible to avoid when the audience size becomes that large. But there’s still important lessons to be learned from these cycles.
Here are the 4 most important things to include in a rebrand to keep it from going wrong:
Audience Research
Brand Positioning
Brand Strategy
Change Management
Audience Research: Are you listening to the people who matter most?
Early on in any rebrand process, you need to really, really listen to and engage with your audiences. Understanding their relationship with the brand, their experience with it, and why they choose your brand is critical. You have to preserve those elements and use them to inform your new brand direction – not just the design, but how you go about the brand and what the experience and business strategy is going forward. You need to vary the tactics, not just relying on quantitative data or measurable research, but also digging deeper into the implicit and subconscious beliefs about the brand. An example of this mix could include:
1:1 interviews where you can dig into pauses, body language, and connect person-to-person to uncover an insight that could never be picked up in a survey;
Focus groups, where group dynamics and conversations can uncover insights that might be hidden in smaller or larger research;
A survey, where you can get macro-level data and measurable insights into the brand from a larger sample size;
Field research, where you can observe people interacting with the brand and have conversations in the moment, where reflections may be different;
Online research, including social listening and audits of earned media, where you can understand what people say and feel when you’re not involved in the conversation; and
Audience testing, where you can go from understanding the brand to understanding the new direction and how people may react.
It’s important that each of these tactics be tailored to the brand and audience. That’s why we love 1:1 interviews and Focus Groups, because it allows you to follow the conversation into unexpected places that may never have occurred to your agency partner or to your in-house team. But some topics we typically explore include:
What does X brand mean to you?
How does X brand make your life better?
What does being a customer of X brand say about who you are and what you care about?
What makes X brand different from their competitors?
How would you describe X brand to a friend who had never heard of them?
What makes you frustrated about X brand?
Audience research also plays into change management, where you’re not just listening to your audiences, but allowing them to be a part of your rebrand process. We’ll dig into that more below.
Brand Positioning: Do you understand your audiences and why they choose you?
With the Cracker Barrel rebrand, brand positioning appears to be a major issue: who are your audiences, what do you do for them, and why does it matter to them? It’s obvious from the backlash that Cracker Barrel’s audiences skew older, more conservative, and that for them, The Cracker Barrel brand is built on nostalgia, a specific geographic area and culture, and not modernizing. Cracker Barrel isn’t Denny’s, Applebee’s, or the Cheesecake Factory. So why try to compete with them when you have a corner of the market that you own? Digging into audience research, younger generations also prefer nostalgia and are actually choosing chain restaurants that remind them of their childhood. If we were writing the Cracker Barrel brand positioning statement, it would be something like:
For customers who prefer nostalgia and an authentic experience , our brand is the only one among casual family restaurant chains that embodies southern hospitality and cooking, because our menu, country store, and experience haven't changed.
If Cracker Barrel had had this positioning statement at the beginning of the rebrand process, it’s a good bet they would have done things differently.
Brand Strategy: What does your brand make people think and feel?
Brand strategy comes out of your brand positioning: it’s the roadmap to what you want people to think and feel about your brand. It’s also an important opportunity to ask:
In a sea of sameness, what makes you different?
It’s where your offering, your personality, and your story come together to communicate why your customers should choose you, and why they should choose you instead of a competitor. For a brand like HBO Max, removing the legacy brand of HBO to use a generic term like Max that any streaming service could use takes away personality and differentiation. It’s where you can use design, voice, colors, and mascots (like Cracker Barrel’s Uncle Herschel) to create an experience that sets you apart. Colors, typography, imagery, and style all work together to make you more relevant, distinct, and memorable than your competitors.
It’s also important that your brand strategy is rooted in actual customer research and strategic brand positioning. Jaguar’s rebrand arguably went wrong when they diluted their brand positioning so much through their brand strategy that they no longer felt like a car company, built on engineering and beautiful design. Critics said they felt like a fashion company, an artistic installation unconnected to cars at all, and they had a point.
Change Management: Planning to prepare
Last but not least is change management. Change management is the process of identifying and engaging stakeholders, identify their incentives and blockers, and adequately preparing your organization to adopt change and implement it going forward.
The Cracker Barrel rebrand may have really suffered from not having a change management process in place, especially with external influencers, incentives, risks, and audiences. A change management process might have identified cultural divisions and political discourse as obstacles to their rebrand, an incentive for divisiveness and outrage, and political commentators and public figures as potential stakeholders or influencers. Having a plan for addressing these obstacles, mitigating risk, and involving these external actors in the rebrand process and rollout would have given them valuable input and advocates throughout the process. Change management in branding is about having a plan and process in place to identify these obstacles at the beginning of the brand process to avoid disasters at the end of the process, when the new brand gets launched.
For example, at the beginning of the Cracker Barrel rebrand, if they had involved cultural figures from the political sphere to get input on the creative direction and rollout plan, that could have dramatically changed the post-rollout conversation (not to mention the design choices they made).
Read more about change management in our Field Guide to Change Management.
If your brand is exploring a rebrand, we’d love to help it be a good process. We’re experts on change management and brand strategy, as well as design. When you combine those, you get a brand that looks good but also, just as importantly, works for your team and your audiences.
Contact us today!
