Podcast Summary

Hosts Charles Nixon and Kiran Kapur discussed the marketing challenges posed by social media, using the Cracker Barrel rebranding controversy as a primary case study. They analysed how influencer and political backlash, notably from former President Donald Trump, forced the company to reverse its well-researched logo update. The conversation then broadened to explore the evolution of roadside businesses, such as service stations, in response to major societal shifts like the rise of electric vehicles and falling birth rates. They contemplated how these trends created new opportunities for businesses to cater to a "captive audience" with evolving needs, transforming service stops into multi-purpose destinations for dining, shopping, and business.

 

Key Points

  • Cracker Barrel's attempted logo update, despite being based on market research, was derailed by a social media backlash from influencers who labelled it a "woke update."
  • The intervention of a high-profile political figure, implied to be Donald Trump, escalated the negative attention to a point where the company felt compelled to revert to its old branding.
  • The incident highlighted a significant gap in marketing theory and education regarding how to effectively manage and counteract the power of online influencers and unpredictable social media campaigns.
  • The discussion transitioned to the evolution of roadside services, prompted by the rise of electric vehicles (EVs). The longer time required for EV charging created a "captive audience" and a business opportunity for service stations.
  • Future service stations were envisioned as evolving into multi-purpose hubs offering high-quality food, retail, and even facilities for business meetings to serve customers during charging times.
  • Demographic changes, specifically the falling birth rate in the UK, were identified as another factor that would likely influence the future design of roadside services, which have traditionally been family-centric.

 

Podcast Transcript

Transcripts are auto-generated.

 

Kiran Kapur (00:04):
Hello and welcome to Opinionated Marketers with Charles Nixon and me, Kiran Kapur. Charles, I think we have to start with Cracker Barrel.


Charles Nixon (00:14):
Well, to most English listeners, the answer to that is "it's cheese" because that's what it used to be. It used to be a wonderful, well-branded piece of mature cheddar, which was wrapped as in more or less an oblong block. But now we're ackeally talking about the Southern American restaurant chain, which has been going for a fair number of years, I think since 1920, so nearly a hundred years, and they decided that they were going to upgrade their logo, remove the old gentleman who was on there and make it a little bit sharper, as well as doing upgrades on the inside of their restaurants. They are basically what I think they call a kerbside or a roadside diner. A bit like you might have seen Little Chefs and possibly Happy Eaters in the past. All sounds sensible, all sounds pretty good at strategy on the basis that it was fairly old and retro, and you might want to bring it up to date, the chief executive who started the process said it was doing very well until a few opinionated influencers got on and called it a 'woke-ish update and they wanted the old style back then a certain president decided he was going to tweet on the subject and all hell broke loose and the company therefore rescinded its branding change has gone back to the old logo.


(01:39):
So the question really from marketer's perspective is how do you manage these sorts of things in an age of influencers and social media?


Kiran Kapur (01:48):
And I'm afraid, I think the actual answer is I'm not certainly can manage it because we know that the company had done their due diligence, they had researched the new, I mean the way the president tweeted about it, you would think that the company had done no research and it was just a from nowhere. Let's decide to decide to do this and ignore what our customers want. But actually there was a logical marketing reason to do what they did. The original logo had, as you say, the old man leaning on the Cracker Barrel. I think he was meant to perhaps be the, I'm not quite certain if he was meant to be the original founder or just an indication of the sort of person that bought Cracker Barrel. I'm really not sure. It wasn't unreasonable to update it. I'm sure they had done their due diligence and their research. The trouble is you cannot legislate for Donald Trump and it is that simple. And I think in a way, I don't think the company could do anything else.


Charles Nixon (02:45):
It's an interesting one because I'm not sure. I mean he put the nail in the coffin, if you like, of the rebranding, but he wasn't the one who started it. So you do end up with a situation where you go to the people who shout loudest seem to have the last laugh as it were. There's another article in the Financial Times this morning about AI influences and how some influencers in China AI generated have got themselves a fairly large following on Instagram and others social media platforms. So the question we perhaps are going through is a naivety and an adolescence as a society and indeed as marketers into understanding the way in which social media influencing should be managed. It certainly seems from some perspective as if you could say, "Well no, okay, I hear what you say but we don't agree with this and we'll carry on".


(03:38):
It's when someone like the president gets involved and you are basically summing your nose at a fairly powerful person that you could get into serious backlash. On the other hand, the question is how do you manage a backlash of people who just don't like what you want to do, which there will always be. I mean, we used to have situations of protest groups against BP in the old days offline and the company was able to manage, but it's now because the spread of influence is so great, and so you have to think about how you are going to handle opinion leaders, opinion formers and the tipping point of the discussion.


Kiran Kapur (04:19):
And as I think you are absolutely right in Cracker Barrel's case, once the President has got involved, it's almost impossible for them to just carry on with what they're doing. But the reputation, it was probably better to go, "Ok, fine" and give up than to try and keep fighting on because there's no logic behind the reason that President Trump decided to get onto it. I mean there probably was a distraction logic from his point of view, but I don't think that commercially, I don't think you're on hiding to nothing. I think you are right, and I think one of the things that actually marketers have been very bad at doing is we know that companies use influencers and micro influencers all the time, but I don't think, and I have yet to be told, that there are any models or theories or academic studies that we can then teach marketers on how you use influencers. I think one of our tutors complained nearly 15 years ago that a lot of the theories that we teach are still related to old industrial days of marketing, and this is one area where I just don't think the academic literature and the models and theories has caught up.


Charles Nixon (05:35):
I can't point to any at the moment, but you've opened an area of interest, which I will go away and research and see what we can come up with. I'm sure there should be some. Certainly you can look at things like the 'Tipping Point' [https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-tipping-point-how-little-things-can-make-a-big-difference-malcolm-gladwell/16029?ean=9780349113463], although it obviously was written before influencers, it does talk about the fundamentals of the cascade of views, the point to which you get when people start to follow. The other aspect is the offline world, which we all live in is an interesting one because I'm not necessarily proposing this, but it would be an interesting approach to say, okay, well I give in, I don't change logo, but then 18 months down the road you gradually evolve the logo with the gentleman on it. You continue your in-store refurbishments and everything like that, but you perhaps keep the logo as it is for a while, but the rest of the rebranding process carries on because that is what is affected by people who visit the stores. And in many instances, apparently we're enjoying the refurbishments. You carry on doing what you were going to do because that was the right thing and that was what the customers wanted rather than the influencers who probably never visited in the first place.


Kiran Kapur (06:49):
And this is the beauty of the online world, isn't it, that people can have, you and I can have opinions about Cracker Barrel and we are on a different continent in a different time zone and probably neither of us ever been to a Cracker Barrel store. I know I haven't.


Charles Nixon (07:02):
No, I haven't. No, I fully set my hand up. I mean, I would see the analogy as being Little Chef, and Little Chef did attempt to refurbish, kept its name, kept somewhat the same logo. They probably did change but wasn't able to survive in the world where cars can go much longer journeys and a result of which is people just want to get from A to B and not necessarily break the journey in between. So there's a societal change rather than just a rebranding requirement. And that may well be the case in America, but probably not because the distances are so much longer. On the other hand, there was a news article about a Tesla diner, some extra word of deluxe, something like that, which is basically someone has set up a very cool place to go and charge your Tesla and have high grade food and lots and lots of services, and how the service station itself is gradually being re-devised as people now move to electric charging and need to be entertained or served whilst their car is charging. So Cracker Barrel may well be onto a change in the marketplace, which he's got to cope with, which may well be an opportunity for it, but not necessarily with the old style.


Kiran Kapur (08:21):
Yes, it's interesting. You are absolutely right that what we've used certainly in this country, the motorway service stations for is very much a quick comfort stop and a quick coffee and off you go again. Whereas yes, you are absolutely right as you know because you drive an electric car, if you turn up with your electric car, you're stuck there for a while, which actually for the service station means so they have a captive audience.


Charles Nixon (08:44):
Absolutely. And certainly one of my mentees in China has basically been given a franchise to create a large number of recharging places, which are all designed with multiple kiosks in them for everything from news, coffee, food, groceries, so that you can do something whilst your car is charging. So there's an interesting opportunity which is indeed evolving as new BYD cars come out now with much shorter charging periods, but it is an opportunity to break your long journey and to something is what Cracker Barrel has been trying to market to for a long period of time. So we have to see a changing market.


Kiran Kapur (09:29):
Yes, and I think the other changing market, which also came in statistics that released this week is the falling birth rate in the UK. Again, as in the falling birth rate around the world, but certainly in the UK we're now at 1.4, which is quite a drop, and that actually is just, again, service stations are on the whole built around children. It's bring your family, there's somewhere for the kids to run around, there's fast food for the kids to eat, et cetera, et cetera. This may be changing, I mean, over a long period of time, that's not going to happen immediately.


Charles Nixon (10:00):
No. Interesting. The service station near me, yes, its got a kids play area, fairly big one with flumes and slides, and one of the ones that I know that is very popular is the Moto Services on rugby, which has got a big kids play area in it, and it's very wide and open and plenty of areas to sit and have a conversation. Yes, an interesting option. How do you evolve that? Certainly, the Apple Green company that used to run a lot of the petrol based ones has moved out of those and into new areas. So an opportunity, I mean, do we see these as places where one might go and do shopping? Is it a convenience store? Is it somewhere to have meetings? Yes. A very interesting set of opportunities.


Kiran Kapur (10:51):
Indeed. And a lot of it based around the fact that yes, I can have a business meeting, we can all come there, we can all charge our cars together and we can sit and have our business meeting, and then there's a reason to hold it at a particular location as well and in person.


Charles Nixon (11:04):
Yes, very interesting opportunities to be had.


(11:07):
Thank you very much, Charles. Catch you next week.


(11:09):
Okay, bye-bye.