True story: I’m in Tuba City, AZ at a grocery store. I’m in Navajo country, checking out with a cute little Native American teen cashier. I’ve got a box of Land O’Lakes butter — the “new” box without the iconic Indian princess. I decide to be a smart alec white boy and ask her if she knew about the change, Without missing a beat, she looks at the box and says:
“Just like the white man — take out the Indian and keep the land.”
I about lost it laughing, the joke was on me. A perfect one-liner for a 100-year logo swap that needed a press release to explain itself.
When a Logo Isn’t Just a Logo
Here’s my take: a company owns its brand. If they want to modernize a mark, that’s their call. The market will judge. What makes people crazy isn’t change — it’s the sermons that come with it, and the pile-on from brands that have nothing to do with it.
- Land O’Lakes (2020): retired “Mia,” the iconic Indian Princess, kept the lake scene, added “farmer-owned.”
- “Squaw Peak” → Piestewa Peak (Phoenix): renamed to honor Lori Piestewa, a Hopi U.S. soldier killed during the Iraq War — the first Native American woman to die in combat. Supporters call it overdue respect; critics say politics drove it.
- Washington NFL name: moved from Redskins → Football Team → Commanders. Now there’s agitation to reverse it back. Fans are split between tradition and “time to move on.”
- Cracker Barrel logo flap: another dust-up where people who don’t buy chicken-fried steak suddenly become brand experts. Outcome: lots of outrage traffic, then… everyone eats.
Who Actually Gets a Vote?
- Owners & shareholders — it’s their IP. They live with sales curves, not quote-tweets.
- Customers — buy it or don’t. That’s the only poll that matters.
- Employees & communities — they absorb the cultural impact (and PR whiplash) long after X/Twitter moves on.
- Drive-by brands — when an unrelated company grandstands about someone else’s logo, it’s usually clout-chasing or cover fire for their own PR problem.
The Chatrodamus Rules for Rebrands
- Say what changed — and why — in one paragraph. No sermons. No 20-tweet threads.
- Show the before/after and ship. Don’t let a logo meeting turn into a culture war press tour.
- Let the market vote for 90 days. If sales hold, you were right. If not, own it and adjust.
- Don’t hijack other people’s rebrands. If you sell burgers, you don’t need to weigh in on butter, unless you are the CEO of Burger Heaven and a top investor of the subject chain.
Bottom Line
Free country, free market. If a logo offends you, don’t buy it. If a rename honors someone you respect, fine — put a plaque up and move on. What we don’t need are perpetual outrage campaigns run by people who don’t use the product.
PS: I would suggest Steak ‘n Shake seek other means of gathering attention to their brand by staying out of something that has nothing to do theirs and demanding a CEO be fired at sunrise. Oh, I get it now, it just occurred to me that the CEO of Steak ‘n Shake, Sardar Biglari is also one of Cracker Barrel’s largest investors. I should have known it was just about money and stock price, not because he cared about “the Old Timer” being removed from the CB logo. Sardar, old buddy, I love your burgers but I suggest you stifle before your brand takes a hit and becomes, “in Sight, it must be Wrong”
Chatrodamus Predicts:
In the future, before any logo changes are proposed by some just-out-of-school staffer in the marketing department the suits conduct their due diligence with the buying public to see if the change will cause a stink with their customer base.