The leadership of the beloved restaurant chain Cracker Barrel has finally made a change at the top. The CEO position will no longer be held by Julie Masino, who spearheaded a logo change and design shift for the company from traditional to stripped-down and modern. Her changes provoked a genuine grassroots revolt. She is now out and replaced by David Deno, former CEO of Outback Steakhouse.
The change took a year and it followed a dramatic reversal of the design and menu shifts, one that led to a recovery of company valuations. But such an experience—called an unforced error in business and sports—lingers and causes a loss of trust. Now the company has the chance to reboot, regroup, and rally back around what made the chain great in the first place.
The changes pushed by Masino were widely perceived to be driven by concerns for wokeness or political correctness. The original logo featured a southern man leaning against a literal cracker barrel, but overeducated and hyper-enlightened people worried about possible racial symbolism. It never made any sense, but the claim was out there and led to an intimidation of leadership to the point of making big changes.
The incident is revealing of our times. The slogan “Go woke, go broke” still pertains. Indeed, the success of the film “The Odyssey” is the exception that proves the rule. In order to get away with politicized casting, you need a director with the fame and skill of Christopher Nolan in order to get consumers to swallow the silliness. “Toy Story 5”—a tremendous movie without any kind of woke coding—has beaten “The Odyssey’s” two-week revenue totals. How much more successful would “The Odyssey” have been had it stuck to tradition?
The Cracker Barrel shift really does underscore the point. In the very near future, if not immediately, the age of using consumer products for the surreptitious marketing of left-wing political propaganda is at an end. It’s just too risky for corporations to do this kind of nonsense. Quite frankly, the public is fed up.
Masino denies that she had any real agenda to her modernization project besides creating an update for the look and feel of the restaurant. The trouble is that we have a whole class of corporate managers in this country who do this reflexively and without any intended malice. The universities are saturated: every class, every textbook, every administrative office, every professional association. For decades, the left has dominated the orthodoxy.
(By the way, I’m uncomfortable using the terms “woke” and “left” interchangeably. I know plenty of people who are on the political left—or think they are. They don’t like powerful corporations. They prefer peace to war. They want civil liberties and freedom of speech. They want a more democratic distribution of wealth. Agree or disagree with the views of the Old Left, they were not like today’s woke crazies who think only of intersectionality, deny biology, and want to abolish the past. This is why I resist using the term “left” as invective only.)
With the shift at Cracker Barrel, the calamity of Bud Light, and so many examples of failed films, we are now faced with an interesting situation. We have a chasm that is opening up between the high fashions in academia, where woke ideology reigns supreme, and the marketing departments of major corporations, which are learning to treat affectations that are blue-coded as potentially toxic.
With a major part of the professional class entirely schooled in left-wing ideas and fashions, then entering the private-sector workforce where none of this ideology is in ascendance, something has to give at some point. Very likely academia itself will have to shift.
In talking to many people who just graduated from high school in the northeast, it is very obvious what their choices are for college: go south. They are tired of the propaganda, the hating on men, the demonization of American history, the nonstop use of “white” as a term of derogation, as well as sensitivity training and constant policing for politically incorrect thought. They want to get away from it all.
One wonders about the future demographics of college and university life, with institutions in the south thriving, alongside religious schools, while secular universities in the north are losing students.
What matters most here concerns a subtle cultural change in marketing priorities. Corporations have long treated brand identity as a canvas for whatever ideology currently dominates elite institutions. That practice is now meeting hard market resistance.
Consumers are no longer passive recipients of messaging; they notice when a product’s heritage is treated as an embarrassment rather than an asset. Cracker Barrel’s experience is only the latest data point in a longer pattern.
Bud Light’s catastrophe remains the clearest commercial illustration. A single campaign decision produced an enduring boycott that cost the brand billions in market value and market share that it has still not fully recovered from.
Target’s similar missteps with seasonal merchandise produced comparable results. Hollywood’s repeated attempts to retrofit beloved franchises with contemporary political checklists have produced a string of expensive flops.
Each case teaches the same lesson: The customer base that actually buys the product is not identical to the professional class that writes the talking points.
Brands evolve. Menus change. Interiors get refreshed. Fine. The difference lies in whether the shift is organic to the brand’s existing promise or an apology for that promise or an implicit rebuke of the consuming public.
Cracker Barrel’s issue was that the changes arrived packaged with the unmistakable signal that the old aesthetic—country, traditional, unapologetically southern—had become somehow suspect. Customers read the signal correctly and responded accordingly.
David Deno inherits a company that has already corrected course on the most visible symbols. The logo is back. The remodeling plans that stripped the restaurants of their distinctive clutter have been walked back. Share prices have recovered some of the lost ground. Yet the deeper work remains.
Trust is slower to rebuild than a logo. The chain has to demonstrate, store by store and menu item by menu item, that it still understands the people who made it successful in the first place.
The larger cultural implication is more interesting still. For decades the transmission belt ran one way: universities and cultural institutions produced graduates steeped in a particular set of progressive orthodoxies, and those graduates carried the assumptions into corporate marketing departments, human-resources offices, and boardrooms.
That transmission belt is beginning to fray. Market feedback is arriving faster and more painfully than academic consensus can absorb. Young people themselves appear to be noticing. Enrollment patterns already show relative strength at many southern and religious colleges even as certain coastal universities struggle with declining applications and rising administrative costs.
If the professional pipeline begins to diversify ideologically, the reflexive injection of progressive signaling into consumer brands will grow rarer simply because fewer decision-makers will regard it as costless virtue.
Cracker Barrel’s strength was never that it advanced any political program. Its strength was that it offered a reliable and thoroughly American experience of comfort food and front-porch rocking chairs. The real America! It was a refuge from progressivism, not a fly portal to it.
Customers did not need the brand to lecture them. They needed it to remain itself. The same principle applies across categories. When a company decides that its primary duty is to re-educate its customers rather than serve them, it has already lost the plot. The market is now delivering that message with increasing clarity.
The age of surreptitious political marketing through consumer goods is not ending because executives suddenly discovered classical ideals. It is ending because the financial penalties have become too large to ignore. Cracker Barrel’s leadership change is a necessary reset.
