This article originally appeared in the Financial Times.
Donald Trump’s war on “woke” is reshaping the fortunes of US companies, with the divergence in restaurant chain Cracker Barrel and apparel brand American Eagle underscoring the strengthening political cross-currents.
Cracker Barrel, a southern-style restaurant chain that dots America’s interstate highways, is still assessing the damage caused by the launch of a new logo — since abandoned — that enraged conservatives and sparked a ferocious online backlash.
“We have a brand reputation issue that we are working through, and that takes rebuilding trust,” chief executive Julie Masino admitted this week. Her task was to “reassur[e] guests that the Cracker Barrel they love hasn’t gone anywhere.”
If Masino and her team were the losers in this year’s woke wars, American Eagle was the clear winner. The clothing and accessories retailer launched an advertising campaign in the summer featuring the blue-eyed, blond-haired Hollywood star Sydney Sweeney that praised her “great jeans”. Some liberals said it promoted white supremacy. Despite that, it was a runaway success.
The company says the Sweeney ads, along with others featuring Kansas City Chiefs American football star Travis Kelce, had garnered more than 44bn impressions and driven nearly 1mn new customers, helping the retailer achieve record third-quarter revenue of $1.4bn.
“The jeans that we made specifically for Sydney Sweeney, they sold out, like, within two days,” chief executive Jay Schottenstein told analysts last week. “They boomed right out, right away.”
The brouhaha around Cracker Barrel and American Eagle shows how deeply American companies are being dragged into America’s culture wars. Companies are struggling to navigate a marketplace that is increasingly defined by hyper-partisan affiliations and the vagaries of online outrage.
Some are managing the increased scrutiny better than others. While Cracker Barrel’s share price is down 48 percent since the start of the year, American Eagle’s is up 53 percent.
“It’s never been as political as it is now,” said Sadie Dyer, strategy director at global brand consultancy Siegel+Gale. “Any new thing that’s launched, any new advertising campaign or change that’s made, people are reading into those changes through the lens of this societal and cultural split.”
Cracker Barrel’s troubles began in August when it ditched “Old Timer”, the old man leaning against a barrel that was long part of its corporate branding. As the howls of protest escalated, even Trump got involved, with the US president saying the company should “admit a mistake” and “go back to the old logo”. Within days it had done just that.
That failed to stem the damage, though, as customers voted with their wallets. Cracker Barrel acknowledged on Tuesday that its revenue fell 5.7 per cent in the previous quarter, it had incurred a net income loss of $24.6mn and downgraded its fiscal outlook for 2026.
“The problem is we’re in a world where a brand can be commandeered,” said Brian Wieser, head of media consultancy Madison and Wall and a former executive at advertising agency WPP.
All companies are potentially at risk, but the most vulnerable are those that “don’t have enough confidence in what they believe in to actually stick to it”. “The biggest problem iswhen they are perceived to be flipping.”
American Eagle also came under attack over the summer, but from the opposite political camp. In July it began to air a series of ads with the tagline: “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans.” Liberals said the double entendre smacked of eugenics, the discredited movement to improve a population’s genetic stock by selective breeding.
Here, too, Trump weighed in, writing on Truth Social that “Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the ‘HOTTEST’ ad out there.” Its limited edition SweeneyCinched Waist denim jacket sold out in a day.
For David Reibstein, a professor of marketing at theUniversity of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, what happened to Cracker Barrel and American Eagle showed how the White House is shaping America’s business environment— and social perception of companies and their brands — in unprecedented ways.
“There’s no question influencer marketing is a big thing these days,” he said. “And the biggest influencer of all is our current president, Donald Trump.”
But the twin kerfuffles also showed how much more scrutiny companies are coming under from consumers increasingly alert to a brand’s visual identity — and the subliminal messages it might contain.
“Every change you make is really a Rorschach test for your audience,” said Dyer. “We’ve trained our customers to look at every nuance in a brand, in the advertising and the marketing . . . and now it’s backfiring, because everyone’s looking at them and saying, ‘Well, what are you trying to signal with this? That you, Cracker Barrel, are changing the values that I know and expect from you?’”
It was by no means the first time US companies have become flashpoints in America’s widening ideological divide. In 2023, conservatives boycotted Bud Light after Anheuser-Busch InBev hired transgender influencer, Dylan Mulvaney, to promote the beer. It quickly pulled the plug on the relationship.
But even a single post along those lines would be almost unthinkable now, with a president who moved within hours of re-entering the White House to shut down diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives both within the federal government and, indirectly, in private companies.
Since then, corporate executives have been wrestling with a dilemma: should they capitulate to Maga orthodoxy or risk conservative boycotts by sticking to their progressive principles?
Many have succumbed. But others, such as Costco, the warehouse retailer, refused to roll back their DEI efforts, while Ben & Jerry’s, the ice cream company, insisted it would continue its struggle for racial justice and inclusion and castigated others for distancing themselves from those goals.
Meanwhile, some consumers have been punishing groups who have disavowed DEI. Earlier this year Black shoppers organised a boycott of big-box retailer Target after it dropped its diversity goals.
Cracker Barrel has also been hit, but more by conservative customers protesting what they saw as a repudiation of its traditional values. Masino said traffic to the chain’s 660 locations was down 1 per cent from a year ago in the first half of August, and down about 9 per cent for the remainder of the quarter.
Masino said Cracker Barrel would work hard to regain customers’ trust, in part by “reinforcing traditions” and “leaning into our legacy, our heritage.”
She said that it had been offering its food at Nascar races, college football games and country music concerts, and had reinstated old favourites to its menu such as country-fried turkey and cinnamon swirl French toast. It also got the family-focused, faith-rooted lifestyle influencer, Samantha Bauchmann, to promote its “crave worthy comfort food” at Thanksgiving.
