To me, Cracker Barrel is a brand of cheese from Kraft, and it predates the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain by more than a decade. It was my favorite cheese when I was growing up.
The current packaging has changed, but no one raised a ruckus when it did. That’s probably because it had no pseudo-neo-mock-quasi-cultural associations.
Fee fie faux
The restaurant chain emerged as Southern society was in the midst of change following the Brown vs Board of Education decision, the freedom marches of the late ’50s/early ’60, the Civil Rights Act of 1965, and the attempt to glorify southern tastes with shows like “Hee Haw.” Yet the image of a guy sitting in a general store next to a cracker barrel was, even when the restaurant chain began in 1966, a relic of a past that Southerners, particularly white Southerners, clung to.
Essence over imagery
Contrast it with the Vermont Country Store. It was expanded by Vrest Orton, whom I met, who was successful enough (and possibly tone deaf enough) to buy and drive around in a Bentley in the very rural environment of Weston, VT. Yet Orton was insightful enough to recognize that his business wasn’t going to grow significantly in New England, and Yankee taciturnity is an acquired taste. It could, however, leverage mail order to increase its revenues without losing its Yankee feel and use that connection with patrons to drive store traffic when those people visited Vermont during “leaf season.”
Orton seemed to recognize that it wasn’t the store, per se, that people gravitated toward (his sons have, at this point, made it more tourist attraction than retail store, having moved most of those sales into a much larger building in Rockingham). It was the type of product, many of them considered out-of-production, that it has trafficked in. That was and still seems to be its primary identity.
Form vs substance
So when the restaurant chain eliminated the white guy and the barrel, it seems to have struck a MAGAnized nerve among the folks who long for the days of steamboats and Dixie. Kinda like the good ol’ boys who haul out the Confederate flag when they’re feeling too conspicuous in sheets.
The change in the Cracker Barrel logo is, otherwise, unremarkable. It’s nowhere near as drastic a change as the furor would suggest. It’s a mere simplification; one that might broaden the appeal to more patrons.
The reality of evolution… in branding
While the restaurants themselves have the same look and feel from coast to coast, they’re less distinctive than the average McDonald’s. They maintain the faux feel of a general store porch with the chairs arrayed out front under a portico, but they’re not, unlike the Vermont Country Store, an actual, one-of-a-kind, un-reproduced country store.
Compared to a company like IBM, whose logo has undergone evolutionary changes over decades .
The current packaging has changed, but no one raised a ruckus when it did. That’s probably because it had no pseudo-neo-mock-quasi-cultural associations.
Fee fie faux
The restaurant chain emerged as Southern society was in the midst of change following the Brown vs Board of Education decision, the freedom marches of the late ’50s/early ’60, the Civil Rights Act of 1965, and the attempt to glorify southern tastes with shows like “Hee Haw.” Yet the image of a guy sitting in a general store next to a cracker barrel was, even when the restaurant chain began in 1966, a relic of a past that Southerners, particularly white Southerners, clung to.
Essence over imagery
Contrast it with the Vermont Country Store. It was expanded by Vrest Orton, whom I met, who was successful enough (and possibly tone deaf enough) to buy and drive around in a Bentley in the very rural environment of Weston, VT. Yet Orton was insightful enough to recognize that his business wasn’t going to grow significantly in New England, and Yankee taciturnity is an acquired taste. It could, however, leverage mail order to increase its revenues without losing its Yankee feel and use that connection with patrons to drive store traffic when those people visited Vermont during “leaf season.”
Orton seemed to recognize that it wasn’t the store, per se, that people gravitated toward (his sons have, at this point, made it more tourist attraction than retail store, having moved most of those sales into a much larger building in Rockingham). It was the type of product, many of them considered out-of-production, that it has trafficked in. That was and still seems to be its primary identity.
Form vs substance
So when the restaurant chain eliminated the white guy and the barrel, it seems to have struck a MAGAnized nerve among the folks who long for the days of steamboats and Dixie. Kinda like the good ol’ boys who haul out the Confederate flag when they’re feeling too conspicuous in sheets.
The change in the Cracker Barrel logo is, otherwise, unremarkable. It’s nowhere near as drastic a change as the furor would suggest. It’s a mere simplification; one that might broaden the appeal to more patrons.
The reality of evolution… in branding
While the restaurants themselves have the same look and feel from coast to coast, they’re less distinctive than the average McDonald’s. They maintain the faux feel of a general store porch with the chairs arrayed out front under a portico, but they’re not, unlike the Vermont Country Store, an actual, one-of-a-kind, un-reproduced country store.
Compared to a company like IBM, whose logo has undergone evolutionary changes over decades .
The Cracker Barrel change is only significant because of the cultural associations it has, and those associations aren’t necessarily admirable. It’s why Sambo’s and Song of the South have been relegated to the shadows of fading memories.
A matter of marketing
In an age when people feel there’s a new right, the right to be offended, any sense of umbrage seems to be fair game, especially when it comes from the very top of the political food chain. If the restaurant’s marketers had been smarter, they’d have tested the new design more thoroughly, developed more options. Maybe even something like this:
A matter of marketing
In an age when people feel there’s a new right, the right to be offended, any sense of umbrage seems to be fair game, especially when it comes from the very top of the political food chain. If the restaurant’s marketers had been smarter, they’d have tested the new design more thoroughly, developed more options. Maybe even something like this:
And they’d have known, before rolling out anything, whether it would raise hackles, be mistaken for the cousin of Cracker Jack, or whether it “comes out like a ribbon lies flat on the brush.”
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