The Bot Army That Changed Cracker Barrel's Logo

And...The man who infiltrated the women's conference

Hello Gobbledeers,

How’s it going?

Here’s the thing about going on vacation - you miss a lot of stuff. Not good stuff - I mean, I was on vacation. Awesome. But I missed stuff, like gobbledy stuff. And people were kind enough to send that stuff to me (thanks Liz C., Michael Z., and Alex K.). If you see something out in the wild and think to yourself, “I know a newsletter writer who would enjoy this,” you can always send me stuff (assuming I’m the newsletter writer you were referring to.)

Let’s jump in. Today we’ve got:

• Powerful Women

• Women Who Shop

• Women Who Change Logos

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Close That iPad Right Now, Ladies

The Wall Street Journal published an article about how annoyed CEOs have become about people texting during meetings. It included this blurb about JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon:

I guess the obvious question is - Did Fortune run out of “powerful women” to put on stage at the Most Powerful Women Summit? Or did they just run out of the “Most Powerful” women, and so they had to backfill that with Powerful Men? Wouldn’t you think that if you were organizing a conference on the Most Powerful Women and you had, say, 37 speaking slots to fill, and you got maybe 33 speakers - like the Most Powerful Women in business - and you asked a bunch of other Most Powerful Women (who, I’d have to assume, have very busy schedules, given their level of most powerfulness) to speak at the event, and they weren’t available, but you still had 4 slots to fill, that you would fill those slots with Slightly-Less-Than-Most Powerful women and just call it a day? But instead you got the 33 speakers signed up and you thought, “I bet the attendees at the Most Powerful Women Summit would love to hear what a powerful man might say to an illustrious group of women who are fighting to gain power in the workplace,” and then that man would use that time to complain that sometimes he’s leading meetings and people attending those meetings will occasionally look at email during the meeting and that - perhaps not surprisingly given his own level of power - he will tell the person who is reading email on their iPad, to “close the damn thing,” and I’m guessing that nobody would respond to Dimon, given his power, that you can’t close an iPad, because it’s a tablet.

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Report: Some Things Are Different From Other Things

“Headline writer” isn’t a job, but it’s a thing some people at publications have to do in their jobs. You knew that, but I had to write something to start this section.

At the New York Post, for example, that job can be fun, as shown by this all-time-classic:

Heh, headless.

But sometimes that job can be torture, as it would be for whoever the poor schmuck was who works at Business Insider and was told that they had to write a headline for a story about how a woman went grocery shopping at 2 different stores and discovered, I gather from the headline, that some things about those 2 stores are the same, and some things about those 2 stores are different.

They thought long and hard, and they came up with this Pulitzer Prize winner:

Hm, interesting. Sometimes the price was the same. Yet other times the price was different. And the experience of walking through the store and putting items in your cart was NOT the same, though I assume in both cases you took items off the shelf and put them in your cart. That part was the same.

Congrats on a job…done.

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The Last Barrel of Laughs

Trust me on this, I thought we were done talking about Cracker Barrel. In fact, I was hoping we were done talking about it. Alas…

When last we spoke about this situation, Cracker Barrel had released a new logo, there was backlash (er, “backlash”) against the change, the company reversed the change, and every “marketing expert” on earth was permitted to weigh in on this story and what it meant about branding and marketing more broadly and also America and also racism and also crackers and also logo design and also political divides and also the color yellow and also and also and also.

So that’s where we left off.

Wellllll, it turns out that all of that backlash (“backlash”) was not, how shall we say, organic? That maybe there were not a massive number of people going online and voicing their displeasure about whether the sign on the diner on the side of I-75 is slightly different than the last time they drove by that diner?

From the Wall Street Journal:

A disproportionate share of the social-media chatter that fed the news cycle about Cracker Barrel’s logo was driven by bots on X, according to PeakMetrics, which works with the U.S. Air Force to identify sources of foreign misinformation, as well as Cyabra, an Israeli disinformation-detection firm.

Hundreds of bots soon began sharing the posts, replying to them and posting their own, PeakMetrics said…The height of activity came just before midnight on Aug. 20, when X saw around 400 Cracker Barrel posts a minute. Seventy percent of the accounts promoting boycotts at that point used duplicate messages, a key marker of coordinated bots…

Oops! Maybe there wasn’t really a massive backlash by people who drive by a diner on the side of the road on I-75 who were upset that the sign outside that diner is slightly different than it used to be? And that that did not, in fact, reflect a larger story about a company’s appreciation (or lack of ) for the history of rural America? Oops again!

So, let’s play a little game. If you are the CEO of a nostalgia-based diner chain, and your company has just gone through a whole very public shitstorm about changing your logo, and then you find out that that storm o’ shit was actually driven by bots, what do you do? Here are two options:

1. You come out and say, “We’re incredibly proud of our brand heritage and we thought it was important to stay rooted in that heritage while still remaining modern and relevant to the Crackers who love this place.” (editor’s note: I’m just guessing that they refer to their employees or customers as Crackers.) “Even though we know much of this discussion was led by AI-powered bots, we still did hear from many of you Crackers (ibid) how much this brand means to you. If we take nothing else from this whole experience it’s that all of you put a lot of trust in this company, and we promise we will do everything we can to exceed your expectations every time you visit us for our delicious pancakes.” (Ed. note 2: they are really good.)

or

2. You fire the agency that led the re-brand because F- those guys.

If you chose #1, obviously you’re not the CEO of Cracker Barrel. (I thought it was fitting to link to the Fox News story.)

This is a good reminder - whenever there is a backlash to a marketing campaign, always - ALWAYS - immediately fire the agency. It’s the least you can do. Literally.

I should stop here and admit something:

I talk all the time about how challenging it is to be a marketer. Oh, nobody listens to us, we get fired all the time, we’re brilliant and everyone is stupid (or something).

But here’s a little secret. Wanna hear it? No? OK, while I’m sharing the secret, you can go watch AI slop videos of Mr. Rogers hanging out with Tupac) (NSFW).

Yes? OK, the secret is that being the CEO is harder than being the CMO.

(Gasp!)

I know. Shhhhh, it’s a secret.

During this whole Cracker Barrel episode there was an undercurrent of, “how stupid is this company?” Like how stupid could they be to change their stores, or change their menu or change their logo, and how do they not understand their customer and on and on and on.

Yet, we’re all marketers here, and the company had a product and marketing problem, so let’s see what you would do in this situation. Here’s what the CEO was dealing with:

The new CEO arrives in late 2023. She inherits a business that hadn’t fully bounced back since Covid, with an aging customer base and a tired brand.

She knows, no doubt, the history of the company - from the anti-gay stuff I’ve talked about before, to its efforts to put that behind it, to the backlash to those efforts. And the backlash to any product changes that have been made (when the company introduced Impossible Sausage, customers freaked out, calling the company “woke,” though the fake sausage sold well.)

So that’s what she’s up against - a stagnating company that is also incredibly resistant to change (who wouldn’t want that job????)

When she arrives she does what any other CEO worth her saltines would do and she hired consultants to tell her what’s wrong with the business - in this case, Bain was charged with looking at the menu, operations, in-store experience, pricing and customer feedback. Brand agency Prophet was hired to turn Bain’s recommendations into a new identity.

Bain came back and said that customers found the food meh, the service equally meh, and the front-of-store retail operation (with all the old crap in it for sale) to be challenging to manage. They recommended a streamlined, modernized menu, a smaller retail operation, and an update to the look of the stores - something that hadn’t been touched since the 1970s.

Those suggestions all seemed reasonable, and in 2024 the CEO introduced an expensive 3-year strategic plan to overhaul the company (y’know how CMOs come into a company and fire the agency and then bring in a new agency? CEOs come into a company hire a consultant and then roll out the strategic plan.)

On the marketing side of things, Prophet interviewed something like 1,000 customers and those customers told the brand agency that they thought the old man in the logo was “old fashioned” and they were OK with it disappearing. Plus, from a marketing operations standpoint, the drawing of the so-called “Old Timer” was so detailed that it was a fuzzy mess when used on digital platforms.

Plus, the company had been using a logo without the Old Timer on its menus and some other materials for more than 6 years without any pushback.

During the summer of 2025, Prophet presented its new brand concept - “Country Hospitality” - to the Board, who reportedly clapped after seeing the presentation.

Everything was great. It actually appeared that everything the CEO had worked on - updated menu, renovated stores, streamlined operations, new brand - was working.

Until it wasn’t.

We talked above about the bots, but there’s another piece here that’s intriguing - the owner of the Steak ‘n’ Shake chain has been a longtime shareholder in Cracker Barrel, and he has been pushing for 10+ years for major changes to how Cracker Barrel is run.

One interesting thing about the bots is that they were amplifying posts/tweets from that specific shareholder. He denies being involved with the bot campaign, but jeez, it seems a little convenient, no?

Anyway, it all goes to shit very quickly. But - can we really fault anything the CEO did? She brought in experts to figure out what was going wrong. She had data from conversations with a thousand customers. She rolled out changes incrementally. She wasn’t focused on cutting costs, she was trying to make what people liked about the place better.

You can say, “well she should’ve moved faster” or you could say, “she shouldn’t have cut the dividend to pay for the plan,” but you can’t say she didn’t do the research.

And the final insult is that every day when the CEO drives to work, she gets to pass this billboard placed by the activist investor:

Tl;dr: Being the CEO is hard because the bots and activist investors are out to get you.

Also, don’t change the logo back. You were right the first time.

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As always, thanks for reading to the end - it’s the best part.

For all you new folks, welcome again. If you’re ever looking for a speaker for your event, I do that (in fact, I have two upcoming speaking gigs I’ll share in the next newsletter unless I forget to do that). I’m at jared@sagelett.com. Or if you just want to chat about marketing or messaging, here’s my Calendly link.

P.S. (BTW - someone asked me recently what the stupid PS link I included had to do with the rest of the newsletter. The answer is - it has nothing to do with anything. That’s why it’s P.S.). P.S. - Do you want to see a very, very, very funky version of the Rocky theme led by trumpeter Maynard Ferguson? That’s a rhetorical question. That guy could wail. Also, The Mike Douglas Show was kinda awesome. Also also, if you’re under 40 you have no idea what I’m talking about. Also if you’re over 40.