On Truth Social this morning, President Trump joined the chorus of Americans calling for Cracker Barrel to “go back to the old logo, admit a mistake based on customer response (the ultimate Poll), and manage the company better than ever before.”

After Trump’s post, Cracker Barrel’s stock price, which had plummeted by eight dollars following the announcement of the company’s new logo and store layout last week, rebounded by three dollars. Whether the rebound was mainly a reaction to the free publicity Trump generated for the company, or a sign of optimism that Cracker Barrel might follow his advice, remains to be seen.

What is clear is that Trump’s intervention notwithstanding, Cracker Barrel should reverse course.

When the company chose to replace its iconic old-man-and-barrel logo with an antiseptic blank slate featuring only the words “Cracker Barrel”, and to transform its wood-panelled tchotchke-cluttered interiors to look sleek and shiny, it ignored the closest thing to a hard-and-fast rule in marketing: that it’s more expensive to convert new customers than it is to keep old ones.

A large part of Cracker Barrel’s value as a company (perhaps a larger part than that of any other national restaurant chain) lies in goodwill — in customers’ lifelong relationship with the Cracker Barrel brand, their memories in Cracker Barrel restaurants, and the nostalgia those memories evoke. Now that Cracker Barrel restaurants have been sanitised to look like Applebee’s, many of those customers will likely stop patronising Cracker Barrel, or will do so less frequently.

And who are the legions of new customers who will replace those lifelong fans and patronise the “Cracker Barrel of the future” (to quote Cracker Barrel CEO Julie Masino)? The company will have to find them through hard-fought, expensive, and very likely fruitless marketing campaigns.

Cracker Barrel’s strategy here is emblematic of an all-too-common tendency in general management: to be too quick to blame bad business results on a bad brand. Restaurant chains end up underperforming for a host of reasons such as location choices, supply chain, customer service, product offerings and quality. But one of the hardest things for any retailer is to develop and maintain a memorable brand that has intrinsic value. That was one thing that Cracker Barrel had, and it should have been the very last thing that company executives were willing to reevaluate when fiscal times got hard.

By reducing its logo and interiors to the blandest, most inoffensive version of themselves, Cracker Barrel is chasing shallow mass appeal. But stronger branding often comes from cultivating a deeper connection with a smaller audience — and from rejecting the idea that every brand must “look like the future” to be better.

A week into Cracker Barrel’s calamitous new brand launch, CEO Masino continues to hold firm, insisting that customers “like” the changes. The stock market, our most accurate public opinion poll on business behaviour, tells a different story. The best course of action for Cracker Barrel is to take the free advice and go back to the drawing board.