• by Tyler Milfeld , December 11, 2025

Cracker Barrel joined an elite group of brands whose marketing missteps may contribute to its ultimate demise. This marketing misstep isn’t just an awkward social media post, or an endorser going off the brand’s guardrails, but what can be a very different and expensive kind of misstep known as brand repositioning.

Here are a few of the common drivers and examples of brands facing an impending repositioning:

Changing consumer preferences: The candy category has been upended by the swift rise of Nerds Gummy Clusters. The Nerds brand was mired in obscurity until its new, multi-textural product disrupted the landscape, reaching almost $1 billion product in sales according to the latest reports. Nerds capitalized on an emerging consumer trend for multisensorial candy experiences, creating a convenient and easy snacking product.

Candy brands are now racing to ride the wave of the Gummy Cluster’s success. That leaves candy brands that emphasize bold, singular flavors with a dilemma. Lifesavers is one of those brands that occupies a nostalgic slice of the candy category. However, its unmistakable holed candy no longer aligns with consumer demand. How does Lifesavers reinvent itself to fit changing consumer preferences? A me-too Gummy Clusters product won’t help.

That’s where a repositioning effort would fail -- the desire to modernize and imitate someone else. The brand needs to find compelling meaning in its roots, identify the consumer problem to solve, show its contemporary relevance, and promote its solution.

Lack of a definitive and meaningful identity: The running shoe market continues to race toward which product offers the softest ride. Cushioning has become the battleground.

Hoka is a relatively new player on the scene, founded in 2009. Hoka is all about comfort and helped create the growing demand for soft landings. Asics, one of its staunch competitors, offers cushioning shoes but has maintained its focus on performance and stability for long-distance runners. Nike and its long-running Air Pegasus series attract entry-level runners with the brand’s versatility and reliability.

These brands have built their images around targeted features. Then, there is a brand like Saucony. It’s difficult to pinpoint what Saucony offers in this vastly competitive marketplace. As it fades deeper into the tunnel, the brand is primed for a repositioning. The answer is not a newly minted logo. Its problems run deeper than that, and a colorful new brand scheme is like lipstick on a favorite barnyard animal. The brand needs to decide who it wants to be and market it relentlessly.  

Narrow positioning: Lunchables was a school lunch staple for the better part of the early 21^st century. The convenient combinations of meat, cheese, and fruit gave parents an easy-to-pack school lunch perceived to be better than many other options. Nutritional concerns slowly emerged, and a 2024 Consumer Reports article put the nail in the coffin. The brand has entered a veritable crisis stage, caught in a social media firestorm of negativity. The core problem is one of perception -- it’s just not a good nutritional lunch option.

And therein lies the problem. The brand is so ensconced as a lunch item, driven by its extensive marketing efforts, that consumers don’t see a place for it anywhere else.The brand needs to discover new usage occasions (and new consumers) where these nutritional concerns are less prevalent. It needs to reposition in a new space.

More expansive competitive set: Do you remember when cereal was the go-to breakfast staple? Driven by the ingenious “Got Milk?” campaign, cereal became the mainstay on every family’s breakfast table.

But now I can’t remember the last time I had cereal for breakfast. That’s because cereal has given way to a seemingly endless array of breakfast choices, from snack bars and yogurt to breakfast sandwiches, smoothies, and protein shakes.

So Lucky Charms and Fruit Loops face robust competition from many other products. Thus, any repositioning effort needs to address this underlying dynamic: What do these brands offer for breakfast that consumers want and need? They have to think more broadly and be more pointed than “magically delicious” and “delicious bursts of fruity flavor.” These fun phrases used to be enough when competing against the less exciting Cheerios, but they’re not enough with a more expansive competitive set.

It’s just a matter of time before another failed repositioning dominates the headlines. But failed repositioning is often a symptom of a much bigger problem – the failure to recognize the problem behind it.

Cracker Barrel’s problems ran much deeper than it logo. The brand was at the crosshairs of a narrow identity (breakfast place) and a more expansive competitive set (proliferation of breakfast options). The repositioning effort did not offer a solution to either of these problems. That’s what expensive and oft-criticized logo changes often reveal: a much deeper problem driven by one of these factors.