A Cracker Barrel location in Homestead, Florida, taken February 20, 2022. By 4kclips/stock.adobe.com.
If you haven’t eaten the “comfort food” at Cracker Barrel, enjoyed the antique country paraphernalia decorating the walls, and shopped in their “country store,” you probably won’t care that they changed their logo and are modernizing their restaurants. Even if you have, you may not consider their corporate re-do an existential crisis.
But there’s more to the story than the fact that the company lost nearly $100 million in market value when its stock plunged after releasing its new logo. According to a creative director specializing in brand development, what Cracker Barrel has done is a textbook case of how not to rebrand.
Jeff Rifkin says the company’s core message is, “We don’t care about our core audience. We’re too busy trying to appeal to everyone and satisfying no one.” In his view, despite corporate explanations, Cracker Barrel erased the quirks and history that made people love their brand and thus lost touch with what it did best.
By contrast, the restaurant chain Chili’s is undergoing what Slate calls a “renaissance.” Three years after a new CEO and a team of executives were brought in to oversee a corporate revival, same-store sales were up 31 percent in the first quarter of this year. This marks the fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, which the article describes as a “corporate turnaround for the ages.”
Their secret? Streamlining operations, simplifying their menu, emphasizing food quality and customer service, and focusing on what the restaurant is most known for—burgers, fajitas, appetizers, margaritas, and ribs. They’re not trying to compete with non-chain restaurants, fast-casual concepts, or quick trends. Instead, they’re innovating for what their chief marketing officer calls the “population that’s right down the middle.”
Why are the Dallas Cowboys so profitable?
One more brand in the news: the Dallas Cowboys are again the most valuable sports franchise in the world. The Dallas Morning News (DMN) reports that since 1996, the team has increased in value forty-seven times over, to a world-record $12.8 billion. However, the team has also failed to reach the NFC championship game even once over the same time frame, the longest such drought in the NFL.
How is this juxtaposition possible?
As the title of the eight-part Netflix docuseries that dropped this month shows, the Cowboys are still “America’s Team.” They boast the most followers of any NFL team on social media; their merchandise tops the league’s ranks and generates the most Google search interest. By the end of the upcoming season, they will have played in twenty-eight primetime games since 2021 (including Thursday night’s game with the world champion Philadelphia Eagles). That’s tied with the Kansas City Chiefs for the most over that span, though the Chiefs have played in the Super Bowl each of the last three years, winning twice.
Cowboys owner Jerry Jones has clearly mastered what Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert A. Simon called the “attention economy.” As the DMN article explains, “In an information- and entertainment-abundant world, people’s attention acts as a scarce commodity, like oil or diamonds, and producers of content become valuable by commanding and controlling large amounts of that commodity.”
In this sense, the team’s thirty-year record of playoff futility works in their financial favor. As longtime Cowboys announcer Brad Sham noted, “There is no sports hate in America that comes close to Dallas Cowboys hate,” but those who hate the team “will never stop talking about them.” As a result, Sham said, “If someone in Massachusetts or Nevada turns on a Cowboys game hoping they’ll lose, that doesn’t matter to the ratings. All that matters is that they’re watching.”
Jesus “never asks us to decide for him”
Unlike the Dallas Cowboys, for whom “there’s no such thing as bad publicity,” the Christian “brand” is undermined every time Christians are in the news for the wrong thing. Our clergy abuse scandals call into question the trustworthiness of our leaders. Our political entanglements alienate those who disagree with our politics.
But there’s a deeper issue here, one illustrated by the contrast between Cracker Barrel and Chili’s.
Methodist evangelistic camp meetings of the early nineteenth century issued public invitations for people to come forward to trust in Christ. Revivalist Charles Finney popularized the practice; D. L. Moody and Billy Graham used what came to be known as the “altar call” in their evangelistic meetings as well.
There is nothing inherently wrong with making public our faith in this way, of course. The Bible calls us to acknowledge Christ “before men” (Matthew 10:32) as we “confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord” (Romans 10:9). However, as I’m certain Revs. Finney, Moody, and Graham would agree, “deciding for Christ” is not enough.
Oswald Chambers put it this way: “[Jesus] never asks us to decide for him, but to yield to him, a very different thing.”
Jesus called us to “take my yoke upon you,” which means to submit our lives to his authority (Matthew 11:28). We are to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice” (Romans 12:1), to be “crucified with Christ” (Galatians 2:20), to take up our cross and follow Christ “daily” (Luke 9:23). The reason is simple: Jesus can change only what he can touch. He can transform our lives to the degree that he is Lord of our lives.
And transformed lives are the Christian “brand promise,” nothing less.
“If man is not fit to govern himself”
Like many churches and denominations today, we can change our theology to adapt to the popularity of LGBTQ and abortion ideologies. Like some in the evangelical world (and despite the clear teachings of Acts 4:12, 1 Corinthians 3:11, and John 3:18), we can jettison our culturally unpopular belief that Jesus is the only way to salvation.
But if we abandon the core tenets of biblical Christianity, we lose touch with what we do best: offering the gospel, which is the only “power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16). By contrast, if we yield our lives daily to Christ as Lord and lead everyone we know to join us, we can never be the same. Nor can they.
Such moral and spiritual transformation is crucial to the future of our democracy. As James Madison asked, “If man is not fit to govern himself, how can he be fit to govern someone else?” And it is crucial to the future of our souls. As Paul noted, “Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable” (1 Corinthians 9:25).
Which type of wreath will you seek today?
Quote for the day:
“We are all servants. The only question is whom we will serve.” —R. C. Sproul
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