The New Coke Revisited
When I’m behind the wheel, no road trip is complete without a country-fried steak from Cracker Barrel, preferably served with turnip greens and fried okra. I’ve become a total sucker for their wholesome nostalgic Americana vibe, being marooned on the Upper West Side so much of the year. One of my very favorite George Jones albums was even an exclusive to the famous Cracker Barrel general store.
But hard times have arrived for the venerable purveyor of down-home comfort food. Even as rates of restaurant patronage have largely reverted to pre-pandemic levels, the older demographics to which Cracker Barrel disproportionately appeals have been slower to return to sit-down dining, and the company’s revenues have been withering on the vine. The Tennessee-based institution finds itself in a thankless, precarious position: it needs to attract new demographics and become more culturally relevant to 2025 America, but yet the whole reason that I and a lot of other customers love Cracker Barrel is precisely because it never changes.
And so the company has for the most part moved gingerly, experimenting with different menu additions, price points, and decor in a handful of individual locations to see if they can thread the needle of tweaking the old format just enough to bring in new customers without alienating their core constituencies. In the meantime, I’ve been holding my breath and enjoying a good thing while it lasts; in interviews, the corporate leadership comes off as a gaggle of glib cookie-cutter MBAs who don’t quite grok what makes their heritage brand stick to the ribs. There’s a fair chance that the executives may end up immolating the brand ala Bud Light if they keep on pulling ham-handed stunts like pushing rainbow rocking chairs for Pride Month. Most Cracker Barrel patrons are probably pretty live-and-let-live with regard to what consenting adults choose to do with their genitals, but the core appeal of eating there is that it hearkens back to simpler times when you didn’t have to worry about people’s pronouns. At a certain point, if corporate were to negate what’s charming and meaningful about the Cracker Barrel experience, I’d have to get my country-fried fix elsewhere.
It's a classic dilemma confronted by countless companies, industries, and political movements—in attempting to revitalize a flagging enterprise, do you change in order to seek new constituencies, or do you lean into what existing customers already love about you in hope that more customers will eventually come around? Is there some way to do both?
Perhaps the most famous case study in marketing history is the introduction of the “New Coke” back in 1985. Alarmed by years of declining market share and well-publicized taste tests indicating that customers preferred the flavor of Pepsi, the Coca-Cola Company devised a new formula that focus groups preferred over both the old Coke and Pepsi, and rolled out the New Coke to replace the former. Backlash was swift and fierce: millions of customers were outraged for a staple of their lives to be snatched away in favor of some newfangled replacement they hadn’t asked for, and the company learned the hard way that many Coke drinkers didn’t drink Coke because of its flavor, but because it had become part of their identities. Sales of the old formula subsequently known as “Coca-Cola Classic” soared when the product was rushed back to market a few months later, enough that some cynics have darkly suggested that the whole debacle must have been planned all along, but in my experience most marketing professionals just aren’t that fiendishly clever.
Take, for instance, the floundering and almost pitiable efforts of the Washington Post in recent months to rebrand itself back to credibility. As of early 2017, in adopting the vain and bombastic slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” the Post sent up a blazing flare to the entire country that it was proudly abandoning traditional standards of journalistic balance and integrity in favor of breathless stenography for Davos Man and the administrative state. With that bold gesture, and then years of shameless #Resistance rumormongering, the once-venerable publication torched the reputation so carefully cultivated over decades by folks like Katharine Graham and Len Downie, and definitively severed itself from the legend of Woodward and Bernstein. (Though having met both Woodward and Bernstein, I’m not sure how much they ever lived up to that mythology, either.)
It's not the journalistic direction I’d have recommended, but it made short-term fiscal sense: the Washington Post’s subscriber base exploded and they garnered tons of sugar-high engagement—and a clutch of Pulitzer Prizes—from their new business model. And then Joseph R. Biden Jr. shuffled back onto the scene, and the party started winding down. Subscriptions had already begun to collapse without the orange bête noire in the White House, but plummeted by hundreds of thousands this past fall when owner Jeff Bezos, reading the political writing on the wall, forbade the Post from formally endorsing Kamala Harris over Donald Trump. Customers were outraged, and why wouldn’t they be? The implicit deal was that they’d signed up for heaping helpings of uncut partisan pornography, and the Post reneged on its commitment.
And so the Washington Post finds itself stranded, without that much more credibility than the National Enquirer, and justifiably disdained by much of its former readership across the political spectrum. The publication reportedly lost $100 million last year, and prospects look bleak unless Bezos can find some change underneath his couch cushions. I almost laughed a few weeks back when I saw their impotent new internal mission statement, “Riveting Storytelling for All of America.” As if that weren’t weak sauce enough, the Post also lacked the guts to formally disavow the old “Democracy Dies in Darkness” bombast, which remains awkwardly on the masthead as a reminder of headier times. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad.
The Washington Post is hardly alone in its gratuitous, eminently avoidable self-harm. During the decade plus that I worked for Columbia University, the place enjoyed an enviable reputation to say the least. As the only Ivy League powerhouse in New York City, it couldn’t claim quite the juice as Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Stanford but still sat atop a highly prestigious global brand whether deserved or not. Hubristically, Columbia’s messaging (some of which I helped draft and fine-tune) increasingly incorporated and glorified the long-infamous 1968 campus riots that had for decades besmirched the university’s reputation. No, it turned out that all that much-needed mostly peaceful activism was sterling example of what the very best of Columbia was really all about, especially in our even more enlightened modern times. Columbians should all be so very proud to be part of that enduring legacy of fierce, uncompromising commitment to social justice, they were told.
And now today the university’s reputation lies in shambles after several generations of vainglorious protests culminated with the ugly fracases on and around campus since October 7, 2023. The expensive degrees for which many alumni went deep into debt have been sharply devalued. The rolling chaos and humiliation eventually brought down Columbia’s president, the Baroness Minouche Shafik, and today her interim successor is still struggling to contain the fallout and begin to try to salvage the wounded university brand. Which isn’t remotely to say that there aren’t still a ton of eager applicants thirsty to get in despite the many smashed facades up in Morningside Heights, but if Columbia wants to preserve its near-$15 billion endowment, it may find itself pressed to forsake a few of its nearest and dearest narratives and indulgences.
Ultimately, even the embarrassing travails of the beleaguered and diminished Ivy League are dwarfed on the national political stage, where the Democratic Party and broader progressive establishment remain shell-shocked gawking at the smoking crater where their reputation used to be. Democrats were supposed to represent John F. Kennedy forgoing the inaugural top hat and inspiring Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” They were supposed to channel Bill Clinton playing sax on Arsenio and bringing in Bob Dylan to perform at his inauguration. They were supposed to manifest Barack Obama declaring that there was no liberal America or conservative America, only the United States of America, before flashing that thousand-megawatt smile. Instead, too many influential Democrats chose to devolve into the party of Doug Emhoff and Ilhan Omar, of lawfare and censorship, of identitarian demagoguery and double standards, and of unyielding efforts to reduce average Americans’ standards of living.
The progressive movement, likewise, was supposed to champion and carry on the proud legacy and spiritual expansiveness of icons like Frederick Douglass, Ida Tarbell, Bayard Rustin, Studs Terkel and Barbara Jordan. Instead, it’s been hijacked by billionaire supervillains and a vast industrial complex of hollow grifters like Ibram X. Kendi and MSNBC’s primetime lineup. The political valence once associated with fighting tirelessly for ordinary Americans’ health care and higher wages is now defined in the public mind by intolerant bullies plotting to persecute political enemies and ban toilets that can actually flush.
With their brand so deep in the hole, and an awfully sparse bench, Democrats and progressives find themselves in a situation roughly analogous to that faced by Republicans and conservatives twelve years ago, in the wake of Mitt Romney’s crushing defeat. As the rightish coalition cast about for explanations and paths forward, some influential members of the conservative establishment issued a campaign autopsy claiming that if Republicans ever wanted to compete in a demographically changing America, they had to finally accede to the corporate wing by caving on so-called “comprehensive immigration reform” and cutting loose unfashionable social conservatives.
But subsequently, by the one weird trick of addressing rather than dismissing everyday Americans’ concerns, Donald Trump rather readily flipped the script to catapult himself into office as an unlikely tribune of the working class. No longer would the vital center be owned by the center left. If Democrats and progressives truly wish to increase their market share, rather than just posture and fundraise, they’ll need to learn how to ignore “the groups” and once again meet voters where they are. And, unhip as it is, that might just be at their nearest exurban Cracker Barrel.
Next: On Mending Over Ending
"Democrats were supposed to represent John F. Kennedy forgoing the inaugural top hat and inspiring Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” They were supposed to channel Bill Clinton playing sax on Arsenio and bringing in Bob Dylan to perform at his inauguration. They were supposed to manifest Barack Obama declaring that there was no liberal America or conservative America, only the United States of America, before flashing that thousand-megawatt smile. Instead, too many influential Democrats chose to devolve into the party of Doug Emhoff and Ilhan Omar, of lawfare and censorship, of identitarian demagoguery and double standards, and of unyielding efforts to reduce average Americans’ standards of living."
Once you understand that Team D is but the political manifestation of the PMC consciousness, and that, as the hegemonic class, PMC values are presumed to be normative, everything makes perfect sense. (FWIW, Team R plays a similar role with regard to Local Gentry, that guy who inherited a muffler shop and parleyed his fortune into a local chain of muffler shops, a few rentals, a nice place on the lake and a Fancy Truck.)
Great article! My only minor quibble is that the legacy media was committed to "breathless stenography for Davos Man and the administrative state" long before it started wanking on about democracy dying in darkness post-Trump.