The Summer They Turned Ugly

Cracker Barrel, HBO Max, and MS NOW prove that not every makeover is an improvement.

Nothing says “we’re in trouble” quite like a bad rebrand. It’s the corporate equivalent of a midlife crisis sports car: expensive, flashy, and instantly revealing of the insecurity it is meant to hide. This summer alone, Cracker Barrel axed its folksy mascot, only to reverse course within days; HBO Max sheepishly revived the three letters it had once discarded; and MSNBC contorted itself into “MS NOW,” a name that sounds less like a news network and more like a clinical diagnosis. Each move was framed as forward-looking, but what they really broadcast is doubt: doubt about their place in the market, doubt about their audience, and doubt about their own identity.

When brands rebrand out of fear, they trade distinctiveness for blandness. The quirks that once made them memorable get sanded down into sameness. In the process, companies don’t just fail to look modern; they also show us how little faith they have in who they are.

Cracker Barrel built its reputation on a very specific image of America: the rocking chairs out front, the walls covered in antiques, the promise of biscuits and gravy in a place untouched by time. Its logo of an old man leaning against a barrel fit seamlessly into that identity. When the company unveiled a minimalist redesign this summer, replacing the figure with a text-heavy emblem, it was more than a cosmetic update. It read as a signal that the company was unsure of what story it wanted to tell.

The backlash was swift. Customers accused the chain of abandoning its heritage. Right-wing commentators called it an act of cultural surrender. Former employees described it as “brand suicide,” arguing that the company had stripped away the very nostalgia that made it appealing. Even President Trump weighed in, demanding the return of the “Old Timer.” Within days, Cracker Barrel’s shares fell, the new logo was scrapped, and the company announced the original design would remain. The reversal was cheered as a “culture war” victory by conservatives and celebrated by investors, with the stock price rebounding once the old logo was restored.

The episode made one thing clear: Cracker Barrel’s logo was never just decoration. It was shorthand for the nostalgia the company sold, a worldview rooted in tradition and continuity. The removal signaled a loss of confidence in its own story, and the quick reversal was an admission that customers knew the brand better than the company itself.

MSNBC’s rebrand followed a different path but made the same mistake. Spun off from NBCUniversal into a new company called Versant, the network wanted to declare independence. What it offered instead was “MS NOW,” an awkward acronym stretched into “My Source for News, Opinion and the World.” The new name lands with all the elegance of a PowerPoint brainstorm. Viewers mocked it as sounding like a forgotten Microsoft product update, or worse, a fundraiser for multiple sclerosis.

The ridicule makes clear how little the rebrand resonates. MSNBC has spent nearly three decades building recognition around its name. Anchors like Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes gave it credibility, and the “NBC” lettering linked it to a legacy of broadcast news. Cutting that tie doesn’t feel like independence; rather, it feels like amputation. To many, “MS NOW” comes off less like a confident new identity and more like a placeholder, as if the network is embarrassed by its own history but unsure of what to be next.

This is what happens when a company confuses rebranding with reinvention. By clinging to the meaningless “MS” while discarding the NBC that actually carried weight, the network is creating the worst of both worlds: a name that is both generic and baffling. Instead of signaling strength, it is baring insecurity, as though the channel’s leadership no longer trusts the reputation on which it stands.

Warner Bros. Discovery’s reversal with HBO Max rounded out the summer of rebrand stumbles. After two years of insisting that “Max” was the future, the company admitted what viewers have been saying all along: the three letters it dropped were the only part that mattered. This summer, “HBO Max” was back. The announcement was met with a wave of memes and mockery, much of it gleefully pointing out that the company had spent millions just to return to the name it already had.

The reversal makes sense, though. “HBO” isn’t filler; it’s a cultural shortcut. For decades, those letters stood for prestige television, for shows around which people built Sunday nights. Removing them created confusion about what the platform was offering, and the rebrand reversal was less about innovation than survival. As one brand consultant put it, HBO had taken forty years of equity and “tossed it in a dumpster,” only to scramble back when the audience rejected the move.

If Cracker Barrel’s redesign reveals anxiety about tradition, and MS NOW exposes doubt about independence, HBO’s U-turn shows how dangerous it is to discard distinctiveness. The company tried to smooth away what made it recognizable, only to find that, without “HBO,” it looked like just another streaming app. By restoring the name, it isn’t forging ahead; it is admitting that the future can’t be built without the past.

Cracker Barrel, MS NOW, and HBO Max may operate in different industries, but their rebrands this summer tell the same story. Each aimed for reinvention, yet signaled nothing so much as insecurity. Customers aren’t rejecting new fonts or logos; they’re rejecting the message that the brand no longer trusts its own history.

The irony is that the quirks these companies abandoned were their strongest assets. Cracker Barrel’s country kitsch, MSNBC’s tie to NBC News, and HBO’s three-letter seal of quality weren’t liabilities holding them back. Rather, they were the anchors keeping them recognizable in a crowded market. In stripping them away, the companies don’t look modern. They look lost.

Bad rebrands don’t just fail because of poor design; they fail because they remind us of what corporations most want to hide: that they’re not sure of who they are anymore. And when a brand shows that kind of doubt, no amount of clean typography can disguise it.

Michelle Yu (MBA '26) is originally from Cresskill, New Jersey. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Film and Media Studies and worked for CNBC, NBC News, and CNN prior to HBS, along with projects for HBO, Showtime, Oxygen, and Spectrum. Outside of work, she is a 2x marathon runner, American Songwriting Awards winner, and filmmaker whose work has screened at the Tribeca Film Festival and AMC's Empire Theaters in Times Square.