The logo caught me off guard.
A red, white, and blue ball appeared to be tilted upward. Beside it, the word pepsiappeared in blue, lowercase text.
Gone was the brand identity I’d grown up with. The one I’d seen on bottles in my high school cafeteria a few years earlier.
No more ball with a symmetrical white swoosh. No more PEPSI in capitalized italics.
Is this even the same soda? I mused. I endeavored to buy a bottle to find out.
Relief washed over my face when that familiar Pepsi flavor hit my tastebuds. The new logo was all I’d need to adjust to.
A few years later, I was driving home from work when I passed a Wendy’s location.
Only I didn’t quite realize it was a Wendy’s.
You see, this location didn’t have the familiar Old West font on its sign. Instead, Wendy’s was written in red script. And the illustration of a girl with pigtails above the wording had gone from cartoonish to semi-realistic.
Those same feelings of unease washed over me for a moment. But then I passed a McDonald’s.
The golden arches on the sign looked the same as they ever had. And I knew that the soda fountain inside would have the same script Coca-Cola logo I remembered from my childhood.
The calming sense of reassurance took over. All was still right with the world.
Why did these logo changes from Pepsi and Wendy’s set me off so badly?
It’s difficult to know for sure. But I believe the issues had roots in my childhood.
You see, logos were some of the first things I learned. Even before I could read or do basic math, I knew what the golden arches meant. The same with the Coca-Cola script, and a host of other brand marks.
The logos of that era were my frame of reference to the world. And I didn’t want that frame of reference to shift. Ever.
Of course, Pepsi and Wendy’s had bigger worries than my sentimentality. They were eternally in the shadow of Coca-Cola and McDonald’s — fighting for relevance and revenue.
While their rivals saw value in keeping brand marks consistent, it was actually riskier for Pepsi or Wendy’s to keep the status quo than to rebrand. So, they upset the apple cart.
In Pepsi’s case, they’d done this repeatedly. The logo I was nostalgic for was actually the fourth iteration of the company’s brand mark. Wendy’s had not rebranded before, but it was a far newer company than the soda maker.
I would eventually read business school case studies about this scenario. I would eventually become attuned to design trends through my marketing career. And I would ultimately fall in love with the art of the rebrand.
But I never completely forgot those moments when I spotted the new Pepsi and Wendy’s logos for the first time. That sense of unease lingered deep in my bones.
Good thing it did.
When I was a young adult, I was far from self-assured.
But if you asked me what my favorite restaurant was, I wouldn’t blink.
Cracker Barrel, I’d blurt out enthusiastically.
My reasoning was simple. Where else could you get a quality breakfast of chicken fried steak and eggs for a mere $12?
I was obsessed with that dish, and a host of other Southern staples on the menu. And I didn’t have the highest of salaries. So, I made my way to Cracker Barrel whenever I could.
This pattern broke a few years later. Despite how my heart felt about Cracker Barrel dishes, my stomach simply could not handle them. (Probably on account of all that butter and cream.)
I hadn’t thought much about the chain for more than a decade after that. But then, shortly before I sat down to write this article, Cracker Barrel changed their logo.
And it led to massive uproar.
At first glance, the new logo didn’t look all too controversial to me. The brown wording had been replaced by black. But the yellow background and the font that read Cracker Barrel remained intact.
What had disappeared was the caricature of a man sitting on a chair beside the wording, with his left forearm resting atop a barrel. The words Old Country Store on the bottom of the logo were also now missing.
That all was a bit jarring to me, but not outlandishly so. It simply looked like Cracker Barrel was simplifying its look.
It was only when I started reading some reports on the rebrand that I understood the revolt. The logo wasn’t all that Cracker Barrel was fixin’ on changing.
Indeed, the chain had remodeled many of its restaurants to match the streamlined logo. Walls were painted white and stripped of most accessories, such as rolling pins.
The “modern” look made Cracker Barrel look like one of those overpriced big-city brunch places. That’s the clientele the chain seemed to want to attract — for relevance and revenue.
This all reminded me of a rebrand TGI Friday’s undertook several years back. The “pieces of flair” made infamous in the movie Office Space were removed. The logo was streamlined. And the menu was revamped with more upscale dished.
That rebrand was mostly met with a shrug. And surely, management at Cracker Barrel thought their rebrand would see the same reaction, at worst.
But they were wrong.
You see, Cracker Barrel brass had conveniently forgotten where their restaurants were located — predominantly in the South and the lower Midwest. They’d conveniently failed to notice that their restaurants were more likely to sit along rural highway interchanges than in core of big cities. And they’d neglected to consider how an elaborate revamp would play in that environment.
This was more than tilting the ball on the Pepsi logo or modernizing the script on a Wendys wordmark. For Cracker Barrel’s core market, this was an outright betrayal. A signal that the chain was too good for people who wanted an affordable Southern-style meal in a homey environment.
And so, a consumer revolt broke out. And after a few weeks, Cracker Barrel was forced to retreat.
The old logo would return.
What can we learn from all this?
From the tinkerings of Pepsi. From the refreshed wordmark of Wendy’s. From the foibles of Cracker Barrel.
The biggest takeaway is that rebranding is a risk. No matter the perceived upsides, the downsides can be more severe.
It’s easy to forget this as a marketer. Like many of my contemporaries, I tend to value the opportunity of a shiny new megaphone more than the dangers of change. I tend to override the unease of seeing the familiar upended.
But maybe it’s time for me to tap back into that emotion. Perhaps it’s time for all of us to do the same.
The world is complicated, and so are emotions. Respecting that complexity — rather than blindly plowing ahead with our plans — seems prudent.
Let’s do so.