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Marketing Brew

Katie Hicks

marketingbrew.com

Brands are capitalizing on ’90s nostalgic appeal 

Why brands like Osea Malibu, Skims, and Reformation are all capitalizing on throwback appeal. 

The ’90s—and the icons that defined the decade—are so back 

Jasmine Sheena

Why Spotify‘s personalization features are in the marketing spotlight

“People see their friends having fun with Daylist and they want to get in on the action, too,” Spotify’s senior director of global marketing said.

The FOMO effect: Why Spotify‘s personalization features are in the marketing spotlight

Alyssa Meyers

MLS revenue from sponsorship, season tickets, and merchandise is all up

“We have an audience that’s young, they’re multicultural, they’re tech savvy,” one MLS exec said. “Marketers are really drawn to that.”

Two dots and an arrow connected by a curving line denoting marketing brand strategy

Brand Strategy

A cartoon image of Kristina Monllos created by Morning Brew

Kristina Monllos

The proliferation of AI tools—and the advertising pitching said tools—can be overwhelming. Companies are pivoting to become “

 because of AI, or finding some other way to communicate that their company won’t be left behind in the AI race.

That overwhelm was something Robbie Ferrara, global creative director at Monday.com, wanted to reflect in the software company’s latest campaign.

“There’s a lot of employees in large corporations that are feeling the pressure to implement AI,” Ferrara told Marketing Brew. “I think we’re all clear that AI is gonna have value, but none of us know how to implement it yet.”

Does Monday.com’s new campaign also pitch a new AI tool? Yes, of course, it does. The 70-second hero spot introduces the tool, Monday Sidekick, by showing its offering as the one that finally soothes workers who are dealing with the pressure to implement AI tools by being the tool that’s actually useful and easy to understand. The company uses humor and an on-the-nose music cue, a cover of 

theme song, “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life,” to do so.

“We’re trying to be different,” Ferrara said. “We’re coming from a place of value, of love, and the fact that we kind of try and build products people love to use. I think it kind of feels right for us, then [to] speak about all the emotional turmoil that comes from adoption and rolling out a new product.”

The ad, created by Monday.com’s in-house creative team, is just one aspect of the new campaign. Aside from the long-form spot, shorter cuts will be used on streaming channels, and there will be out-of-home ad placements in six major airports, including JFK, LAX, and SFO.

Speaking to the company’s target audience of professionals flooded with these pitches and pressure allowed the creative to reflect the stress and humor of being inundated with all things AI.

“I feel like there is an overwhelm going on, and people are just—you’ve seen the memes, right?” Ferrara said. “There’s the 

 [scene] which is, ‘Sell me this pen,’ and [the meme] just says, ‘It’s got AI.’ There’s just so many funny comedic moments.”

Photo collage of Monday.com's new campaign ad contained in abstract shapes.

Monday.com reflects the ‘pressure to implement AI’ in new ad campaign for AI tools

The software company is aiming to engage with employees’ feelings about AI. 

Times are a-changin’. Eighty percent of marketers surveyed think marketing will look completely different 18 months from now, and nearly 90% said that agility is the most important trait for a marketer to have these days, according to a survey conducted by Morning Brew and shared at our annual Marketing Brew Summit in New York.

Marketers from Sephora, Duolingo, and more showed up onstage at the summit to talk about how they’re working to stay agile amid the shifts. Below are some key takeaways from panelists on how they’ve adapted their marketing strategies ahead of 2026.

 Campaigns that take into account the specific audience they’re catering to and/or social trends of the time can boost impact. Take Duolingo, which, while known for its often-viral 

, is rolling out an anime series in October after seeing manga lovers drive a spike in the number of users learning Japanese on its platform, Manu Orssaud, Duolingo CMO, said onstage.

“It’s the same thing with Korean. People learn Korean because they’re really into…K-pop,” he said. “It’s connecting language to that cultural affinity they have. Anime is a huge fandom, and it’s also one that really connects to our core offering, which is language learning.”

Relatedly, Audible altered its marketing playbook for the Japanese market after an initial batch of global creative did not perform as well in the market as it did in Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US, Cynthia Chu, Audible’s chief financial and growth officer, said onstage. “We actually had to create the word ‘audiobook,’” she said.

While the team was focused on driving brand awareness, “we had to create category awareness” too, Chu said. With that said, she added, “The consistency is the core of the messaging…That didn’t change, but the execution of that did change marketplace by marketplace.”

 Sometimes, new audiences inspire brands to think outside the box. When video game developer Gamefam worked on a 

, on Roblox, the team took into account the fact that Roblox is largely populated with Gen Alpha users who may not know Cher as well as older generations might, Ricardo Briceno, Gamefam’s chief business officer, said onstage. To drive awareness of Cher and her music among a potentially new set of listeners, Gamefam created a Roblox quest to collect and deliver holiday presents that were set to songs from 

. The activation coincided with an uptick in Spotify streams of the album, he said.

Sephora similarly supplemented its marketing as part of a push into 

. In January, it became the official beauty sponsor of women’s 3-on-3 basketball league Unrivaled, and created, among other things, a “glam room” at the league’s facility in Miami, Florida. In April, Sephora was announced as a founding partner of WNBA expansion team the Golden State Valkyries. As part of that partnership, Sephora has placed a kiosk at Chase Center in San Francisco, California, where the Valkyries play, where fans can try and buy beauty products, Emmy Brown Berlind, SVP and general manager of loyalty at Sephora, said.

The Unrivaled partnership is “an example of how we’ve been able to connect the self-expression that already exists within those spaces with what we offer as a brand,” she said. At Valkyries games, “people take selfies in front of [the kiosk]. They’re buying their lip glosses while they’re at the game.”

 In an era of continual generative AI creep, marketers may benefit from focusing on their tech capabilities. Duolingo created its own social scraper tool that scrapes comments from social platforms to help the brand identify themes within relevant fandoms to help inform its strategy, Orssaud said. Unilever similarly uses social scraper tools, developed by an agency it works with and customized for different Unilever brands, for social listening, Kathleen Dunlop, CMO, beauty and wellbeing, North America, at Unilever, said onstage. That listening can help inform big-swing campaigns: for its award-winning “Vaseline Verified” campaign, Unilever used social listening to identify the many ways that consumers use Vaseline, including beauty hacks along with household uses, like softening a baseball glove.

Many brands are also embracing AI to help create video to meet an increasing demand for content, Aston Ford, manager of video operations at Mntn, said onstage, but he noted that a human touch is still key.

“The marketers that want to continue to have an edge will need to depend on human creativity in order to stand out from the rest,” he said.

Duolingo CMO Manu Orssaud and Marketing Brew senior reporter Katie Hicks.

How marketers are meeting the moment in 2025

Marketers from Sephora, Duolingo, and more appeared onstage at the annual Marketing Brew Summit to talk agility and change.

Academic cheating is an age-old concern. But while students used to peek at classmates’ Scantron sheets to see which bubbles were filled in, there are new tools that some say could supercharge cheating: generative AI.

That’s not stopping gen AI brands from marketing themselves to not just college students but also faculty this school year. As the fall semester kicks off, companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are pushing their tools as vehicles to promote learning rather than impede it and pitching themselves as educational collaborators to colleges and universities, many of which are in the midst of creating policies to address GenAI use.

At the same time, some of the players in the AI race are targeting students more directly through campus clubs and ambassadorships to get them further integrated with their brands.

“This year, it really has just exploded,” Evan Levine, senior director of IT services and support at Duke University’s Office of Information Technology, told Marketing Brew. “There’s so many tools and offerings, and there’s very little understanding of what the differences are, or how to use these things effectively, or what that means…This summer, we were faced with a major educational challenge…We want people to come back [in the fall] to this amazing suite of tools and services and ways of doing things that they didn’t necessarily have before, but also, how on Earth are they going to know how to use them?”

To understand how GenAI companies are marketing themselves to colleges and students, it’s helpful to understand the needs they say they’re aiming to address. Ahead of the school year, Duke held four GenAI workshops to help educate students on how to use related tools earlier this summer, Levine told Marketing Brew. The university generally considers “good attendance” to its tech workshops to be between 20 to 30 students, Levine said; those four workshops brought in between 700 and 800 students.

For some universities, welcoming AI brands onto campus is an acknowledgement of the inevitable.

“There’s no way we can really completely abandon [GenAI] or…punish students for using it,” Sabit Ekin, associate professor and director of the Generative AI Literacy Initiative at Texas A&M’s Institute of Data Science, told Marketing Brew. “They will be using it.”

OpenAI’s ChatGPT product is one of the most widely used GenAI products by students, with ChatGPT usage hitting a peak of 97.4 billion tokens on May 27 (each token represents about four English characters, according to the company), around the time of finals season for students, according to data released from the AI platform OpenRouter and reported by 

Amid student interest in understanding the tools, GenAI companies are pitching themselves to schools as collaborators to promote learning. OpenAI, which has struck up relationships with both Texas A&M and Duke, has sought to brand its tools as useful for enhancing education. Its NextGenAI consortium, a group designed “to support students, educators, and researchers advancing the frontiers of knowledge,” includes 15 research institutions, including Texas A&M, and Duke, through which it says it is providing $50 million in research grants, funding, and API access. In June, the company held a roundtable in New York, where academics discussed AI in education.

AI is “a fast-growing, fast-paced thing in general,” Levine said. “All these companies are relatively new, and then higher education is a different type of market [with] different types of requirements and demands.”

Another major player in the GenAI space, Anthropic, is taking a student-centric approach to promote its GenAI product Claude to students. In April, the company rolled out Claude for Education, a version customized specifically for higher education, Greg Feingold, who oversees community programs at Anthropic, told Marketing Brew.

Feingold said the students he speaks to “are already very aware that if they use AI to cut corners, it’s not going to be beneficial to their education in the long run,” and that they seem invested in learning “how to use AI thoughtfully.” To that end, the company is seeking out college students to create on-campus “Claude Builder Clubs,” which will organize educational workshops and run hackathons, among other undertakings. In mid-August, Georgia Tech inaugurated the first on-campus Claude Builder Club, and the program is now active at more than 50 universities, including UNC Chapel Hill and Johns Hopkins.

To make further inroads on campuses, Anthropic is also expanding its student ambassador program. Ambassadors represent Claude to student organizations and faculty departments while hosting activations and other events on campus.

Through the programs, Anthropic is aiming to reframe and engage with concerns faculty or students might have about GenAI use in academic settings, Feingold said. As part of a partnership with the London School of Economics that includes free student access to Claude for Education, which became active in May, Anthropic hosted a roundtable with faculty and students to discuss concerns with GenAI use in schools.

“We definitely don’t shy away from exploring the potential concerns of how AI could be used negatively in education,” Feingold said. “In fact, we make it a big part of our programming to explore the issues and potential solutions.”

On campuses, GenAI companies brand themselves as academic friends, not foes

Brands like OpenAI and Anthropic are hoping that faculty and students will see them as promoting learning rather than impeding it.

Jennimai Nguyen

A Broadway show uses many of the typical avenues to get its name out there, from TV ads and social media campaigns to OOH components across New York City, and even the buzz of celebrity-cast involvement.

Then there is the merchandise itself, bespoke pieces often emblazoned with the show’s name or creative references to the source material, which can organically promote the show to a fan’s family, friends, coworkers, or even passers-by who are sharing the same subway car.

But what happens when fans think the merchandise is…well, uncool?

Earlier this year, popular theater TikTok creator and podcast host Jonathan Lewis, better known online as The Sweaty Oracle, posited in a 

 that “Broadway is actually allergic to producing any kind of attractive merchandise.” Lewis, who has more than 90,000 followers on the platform, critiqued several current shows’ efforts and suggested that merch is suffering from the trend of 

 and a general lack of creativity. The comment section reflected broad agreement, with several users lamenting that recent theater merchandise can feel more like a “walking ad” than a service to fans.

Michael Rego, founder of the agency The Araca Group, has created and strategized merch for long-running shows like 

as well as limited runs like last season’s 

, and he said that while merchandise is made for fans, it does also function as an ad.

“A very wise person in the advertising business once said to me that every dollar we sell in merchandise is two to three dollars we don’t have to spend in advertising,” he said.

With that said, some Broadway marketers, both established and independent, are looking to give merchandise a reboot to superserve savvy fans who want something a little different.

The Araca Group was born out of Rego and his co-founders’ desire to produce theater in New York, and the company operates a show production arm in addition to its marketing services, which Rego said informs its merchandise strategy.

“For us, merchandise really was an offshoot of our producing, content-creation mindset,” he said. “We started handling merch because we just weren’t really satisfied with a traditional form of merchandise.”

Rego traces the beginnings of Broadway merchandise back to the ’80s, when shows like 

 began selling attire and tchotchkes mainly featuring show logos. When The Araca Group came onto the scene, he said, such an approach was no longer enough.

“By the time we came into the business, we said, ‘Gosh, there’s so many other ways that intellectual property merchandises itself,’” he said. “For the sense of trying to be fashion-forward, of being on brand, having an integration with marketing, to creating a retail destination.”

Being fashion-forward seems to resonate particularly with modern fans, he said, and some fans online have shared a desire for more subtle merchandise, leaning into an “if you know, you know” aesthetic over bold show logos. Rego’s company aims to serve this audience, he told us.

“There’s a certain audience that wants to have the brag,” he said. “But then there’s a whole other audience that’s out there that wants to emulate the feeling that they have from seeing a show. It’s something more aspirational, and they don’t want to actually feel like they’re doing a hard sell when they wear a T-shirt.”

The Araca Group’s internal sales data shows that more subtle merch is in high demand, and Rego said talking to theatergoers on the ground also helps inform the types of merch and design ideas that eventually get made. But fans aren’t the only ones influencing the merch machine, with show producers, authors, and investors all being stakeholders in the merchandise business. And their opinions hold weight, especially as Broadway, like movie theaters, continues to look to make up for slow-to-return audiences.

Still though, Rego thinks that seeking to serve the audience first is what makes merch work for both the fan and business-minded.

“Ultimately, merchandise really should go back to help the marketing of the show,” Rego told us. “It should help sell tickets. It should help create word of mouth and give our audiences a feeling of being an ambassador for the show.”

For those unsatisfied with current Broadway merch, though, there is a booming sub-industry of independently designed products being made and sold on platforms like Etsy and Redbubble. While not officially sanctioned by productions, occasionally those designs catch the attention of the shows themselves.

Julia Lawrence’s T-shirt design featuring themes inspired by 

 is one of these. Lawrence, a graphic designer and self-described theater kid, originally made a design inspired by the hit show, which is about a group of high school students studying Arthur Miller’s 1953 play 

, using imagery from the original cover of the play, that quickly picked up steam among theater fans online. The show reached out to her to commission a new design, as it didn’t have the rights to the original cover art, which is how Lawrence landed on imagery depicting girls dancing and featuring the quote “I contain freaking multitudes,” a standout line from the show.

Lawrence has posted various other digital redesigns of theater merch on her TikTok page and 

, and she said her artistic approach to design is what she believes drew the 

“When I design a merch piece, [I think] ‘Would I want this hanging on my wall as a piece of art?’” Lawrence said. “I never want it to be a logo or words just slapped on a shirt. These productions are so beautiful and intricate in their works of art, and I believe the merchandise should be an extension of that.”

As theater fans connect online and shows shift their own approaches to 

, Lawrence said she believes merchandise is at a turning point, and said that tapping into the feedback loop available through social media could be a way forward.

“There are some productions that are…listening to what fans want, and so they’re building online communities, even among fans who haven’t had the chance to even see the show live,” Lawrence said. “That kind of reach, I think, creates a demand for merch that helps fans feel connected to the show, even from afar.”

A photo collage of merch from the Broadway play, John Proctor is the Villain

Why Broadway merch is going the subtler route 

Fans online have complained about feeling like a “walking ad” when wearing their favorite theater shows’ merchandise, and agencies and indie designers have taken note.

The design landscape is changing rapidly. In some ways, it’s more accessible than ever as AI tools flood the market and AI companies pitch consumers and businesses alike on its ease of use. In others, it’s becoming more difficult to balance the need for personalization, the myriad touchpoints, finding ways to stand out amid the onslaught of AI slop, and more.

To understand how brands are managing this shift, Marketing Brew caught up with Kiser Barnes, chief creative officer and partner at Red Antler, who is set to speak about that topic at our upcoming 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

You joined Red Antler last year as partner and chief creative officer. Tell us about what you’re doing. 

What I’ve been doing over the past year is really helping to evolve Red Antler into the new era of what brand building means. Brand building now is much more multidisciplinary in terms of the touchpoints that it needs to impact, the touchpoints that it needs to affect.

There are two things that are happening. One is [that] tech and marketing are merging. Tech brands are becoming marketing brands. Marketing brands and agencies are becoming—are being forced to become—tech brands. And the tools are accelerating the speed at which we need to get to market. They’re also accelerating the ability to personalize and customize brands in ways that it’s never been before…The second part of that is about social and the idea that people are interacting with brands in very fragmented ways and multi-touchpoint ways around social. The first way you might interact with a new brand might be through a social post versus the traditional way of the past, which was typically through advertising or through a website or through some sort of marketing material…In order to be a brand expert and a brand builder, now you have to be able to think about how you orchestrate across all of these different touchpoints. You, of course, have to think about the tools and the ways that those tools become increasingly relevant to the work that you do, and you have to evolve constantly.

How does the cultural desire for personalization change the design conversation? 

It’s so exciting from a design standpoint. It means that we have to build increasingly modular brands. A lot of the ways that we think about brands are shifting from this idea of the brand bible that sits on a shelf somewhere and collects dust into this mode of a living, breathing thing that should always be evolving and always shifting…It means that we have to build a wider toolkit for brands. We’ve got to build enough of a toolkit that can be taken right by social influencers, or it can be taken by vendors, or it can be plugged into experiential in the real world. And so we have to really think wide now. I don’t think that brand teams ever did that in the past…To build a brand now, you can’t just think about the logo and the font and the color and that stuff. You’ve got to not just test it out but really think about how it shows up in the real world as experiential or retail, how it shows up on social platforms. And you have to really know those spaces…It just means that we have to build brands from a design standpoint, brands that are much richer, much more modular, much more connected to full-ecosystem thinking.

That’s all happening at a time when people have much stronger reactions to brand changes today, like we just saw with 

Brands are much more fluid, and they’re really responsive to culture now. This old idea of a pristine brand sitting in an ivory tower is not as relevant anymore. And again, it’s this influence. It’s the impact and amplification of social and influencer[s]. If you think about it, we’re in a culture of influencer. I don’t think that’s set in, but our president is an influencer, our entire cabinet is made of influencers. Not to be provocative, but we are in a culture now of influence, where influence is king. That means that brands have to be more democratic. They’ve got to really think about what their people and their fans and their loyalists really think about and care about in the brand.

Ultimately—hopefully—that’s a good thing for brands. It means it’s more influenced by [the] community, it’s more influenced in the sense of co-ownership. But I do think that’s a huge pivot.

Another major shift that we’ve touched on is the introduction of all of these AI tools to the market. That’s changing the design landscape. I’m curious, if everyone is using the same tools and those tools are trained on what has been, how can design continue to push the envelope? 

The tools are really great for, in my mind, workflow, amplification of ideas, creativity. I have a thesis that the human soul is about experimentation. What makes us really creative, and what makes us feel, what creates differentiation is experimentation. It’s like when jazz came into the scene and it created a new language of music. Every single cultural shift and change has been driven by this incredible explosion of creative experimentation. And that is what makes us uniquely human…The machine and AI can’t do that, certainly not now. I’m sure it’ll be programmed to do a little bit more of it. But that’s what makes us unique, and I do think we’re already starting to see a response to AI and to this mass adoption of AI.

You’ll see it in fashion and luxury brands are going back to stop-motion and handcrafted techniques for creating content, which is really beautiful. I do think there’s always a pendulum swing…Brands go back and forth. But I do think, ultimately, the tools allow us to do things more rapidly. They allow us to touch more spaces, and they allow us to have more depth in terms of strategy research, the foundational pieces of brand building. So from a design perspective, they allow us to take an idea and really amplify it…I do think we will always have to, as creative leaders, show up in ways that feel differentiated and cut through that sort of clutter of noise. There’s this idea of AI slop, that everything will be kind of created by AI, and it’s bots speaking to bots—the dead internet theory. There’s so many kinds of theories around this and that. Ultimately, we’ll have to find ways to differentiate, and once those tools become widely adopted, we will come up with more interesting ways to approach creativity and to approach marketing. I believe that strongly. That’s what the human spirit’s all about.

Red Antler’s CCO on the new era of brand building

Ahead of the Marketing Brew Summit, Kiser Barnes told us how the design shop is creating “richer, more modular” brands for the future. 

American Eagle CMO Craig Brommers has no regrets about those Sydney Sweeney ads.

 to the apparel brand’s “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” campaign, which largely centered on the use of language that 

 racially coded, Brommers told us that AE’s 

“Sydney Sweeney is worth every single dollar that we invested,” he told Marketing Brew. “Every single marketing metric that I look at is flashing a green light, and we’re only six weeks in.”

The campaign, which launched in July, generated an “unprecedented spike” of 790,000 new customers acquired across every county in the US, Brommers said, in addition to nearly 320,000 new social followers, “denim sell outs,” and “strong, positive traffic.”

That stands in contrast to third-party data 

 with Retail Brew last month that found that foot traffic was down 9% at American Eagle stores in the first week of August, and an Adweek 

 based on consumer transaction data that suggested online chatter did not lead to an immediate increase in sales. On its earnings call Wednesday, the brand’s parent company, American Eagle Outfitters, reported positive increases in traffic in the month of August and a 2% increase in revenue through the end of the quarter on August 2, which CEO Jay Schottenstein said “exceeded our expectations.”

So far, Brommers told us, the Sweeney campaign has generated 40 billion impressions. He disputed claims suggesting that the language used in the American Eagle ad was 

 designed to generate clicks and views. Instead, the message was intended to “spark a conversation about optimism, confidence, and self-expression,” he said. “I think the results speak loudly that a broad base of customers understood that.”

After rocketing to national news due to the controversy, American Eagle has embraced its moment in the spotlight. Last week, the brand announced a clothing collaboration with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce as part of what Brommers called an effort to turn “buzz into business.”

“We wanted to work with talent who define culture,” Brommers said. “By partnering individually with Sydney Sweeney and then Travis Kelce, there is no question that we have the most talked-about marketing campaigns of the year.”

Looking back at the first month and half of the Sweeney campaign, Brommers said that “marketing can move culture, marketing can move product, [and] marketing can move stock prices. ‘Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans’ certainly did all three of those.”

In response to accusations of racially insensitive language, Brommers said that the campaign “was always about the jeans,” which is the language the brand used 

 following the backlash in August. The brand’s response and decision to post a statement online responding to the backlash was about taking a moment to “ensure clarity” about the meaning behind the ad at the same time that positive performance data was rolling in behind the scenes, he said.

According to Brommers, the Sydney denim jacket sold out in one day, and the Sydney Jean sold out in one week; there are plans to restock the jeans ahead of the holiday season.

“We have learned so much over these last six weeks,” he said. “Don’t always believe the negative hype machine, especially in social media. Listen to what your customer is saying and what your business performance is telling you.”

 that American Eagle pulled some elements of the campaign from social media that had drawn ire (namely a video where Sweeney talks about genes being passed down from parents to offspring), Brommers told Marketing Brew that no elements of the campaign were removed entirely and that “every single asset that is supposed to be on the world is out in the world.”

“You have to have a certain mindset when you’re in the middle of all this noise, and the mindset that we had to choose between was, ‘Are you managing a crisis or are you optimizing an opportunity?’” he said. “We chose the latter.”

American Eagle is continuing to seize on its moment in the media through a collaboration with Kelce’s streetwear brand Tru Kolors, which was announced a day after Kelce and Taylor Swift announced their engagement. The timing was certainly opportune, but Brommers said the launch was a year in the making and not tied to the big news. According to Brommers, AE x TK drove three times more sales in one day than past American Eagle collaborations did in a week, not including Sydney Sweeney, and a second product drop is coming soon.

Similar to Sweeney, Brommers credited Kelce’s cultural impact and cross-gender appeal for the success and said the next era of American Eagle’s marketing will be centered on engaging the brand’s newest customers acquired from both campaigns.

Immediately after the Q2 earnings were reported, American Eagle’s stock 

. Advertising expenses from both campaigns are expected to hit in the next quarter, according to the earnings call.

“A brand campaign cannot be measured in one month,” Brommers said. “We will be judged ultimately on the success of this full quarter and the success of our remaining fiscal year…so really it’s about our quarter-to-date momentum and how we build from here.”

Update 9/5/2025: This piece has been updated to clarify data from American Eagle Outfitters’s earnings call.

American Eagle CMO: Sydney Sweeney campaign was ‘worth every single dollar’

CMO Craig Brommers told us that “every single marketing metric” is up since the controversial campaign rolled out in July. 

Rebrands aren’t just rebrands anymore. No, silly—they’re a moment for public discourse about where brands stand politically and an opportunity for onlookers to declare what design overhauls say about those stances.

Consider the case of Cracker Barrel. Last week, the chain eatery known for its kitschy Southern aesthetic introduced a new brandmark that removed its titular barrel as well as the character known as Uncle Herschel or Old Timer as part of a 

 and restaurant experience refresh. After the move was announced, Cracker Barrel’s stock took a 12% dip amid public criticism, which quickly 

 as right-wing commentators accused the brand of “going woke” instead of simply opting for a re-

The company released a statement on Monday that it “could’ve done a better job sharing who we are and who we’ll always be,” before President Donald Trump 

 in on Tuesday and urged the company to return to its previous logo. Later that day, Cracker Barrel 

, releasing another statement announcing that “‘Old Timer’ will remain.”

Cracker Barrel isn’t alone in managing backlash to a rebrand. MSNBC’s rebrand to 

 caught ire and scorn in equal measure last week, and HBO Max’s short-lived there-and-back-again 

 was the internet’s favorite punchline earlier this year. But increasingly, rebrands are getting dragged into the culture wars. Late last year, Jaguar faced a round of 

 for its new logo that opted for a sleek new design over its beloved heritage mark to signal its move into the electric vehicle market; one ad from the new look was recently derided by the president as being “woke.”

Rolling out a rebrand is no longer a simple act of changing typefaces, logos, or taglines, and brands are faced with evaluating rebrands from all angles and determining how best to communicate them. While there have been many controversial rebrands over the years (remember Tropicana, Gap, or Pepsi?), the current cultural climate makes it all the more likely that a rebrand could draw the wrong kind of attention, and there are few ways for brands to prepare for the possibility, according to branding experts.

“Brands need [to] start getting comfortable with the [fact that the] culture wars may pull you in,” Douglas Brundage, founder and CEO of brand studio Kingsland, told Marketing Brew.

Anticipating responses to a rebrand is par for the course for marketers, and rebrands of any kind can often attract loud feedback from naysayers, experts say.

“At this point, I’ve yet to see a brand do a significant identity shift that didn’t get people hating it,” Nathan Jun Poekert, a CMO advisor and marketing consultant, wrote in a text.

In a moment where political tensions are high, a shift of any scale can draw negative attention or projections about company reasoning, which is something marketers have little control over. While marketers could do more focus groups, testing, and spend more time talking to their core customers, there’s no guarantee that will help mitigate that risk, especially from high-profile individuals intent on inflaming political tensions.

“I’m just not sure how much testing is even valuable anymore in an era where people are getting millions of views [when they] have thousands of followers for a single post targeting brands,” Jun Poekert said. “Focus groups have zero defense against cancel culture in a politically charged environment where a majority of the country is angry right now.”

With that said, there are some ways marketers might look to communicate to well-intentioned consumers about the reason behind the change. Sadie Dyer, strategy director at brand consultancy Siegel+Gale, suggested that if Cracker Barrel had found a way to give “people reassurance that this was not a strategic move to appeal to a different audience,” that could have helped it get ahead of any backlash.

In many cases, though, rebrands are still necessary, and Dyer said brand marketers are more careful and thoughtful about making a change.

The types of questions marketers ask when embarking on a rebrand “haven’t actually changed that much, because it’s always been about distinctiveness and authenticity,” Dyer said. “What makes you distinctively you, and what does this [make] you look like in the future? What do we want to be for the future, and then how do we evolve to meet that?”

As marketers consider those questions, they’re doing so at a time when people seem to be paying more attention to how brands are communicating with customers, how they show up, and the moves they make in the market.“We’re in an era where brand is becoming valued in the way it should be by a lot of these companies,” Brundage said.

Fixing a brand’s challenges in the marketplace often doesn’t start—or end—with a brand logo, and rebrands can be costly as well as time-consuming: Dyer said it can take anywhere from six months to a number of years, depending on the number of stakeholders involved and the extent of the changes. Before making that investment, marketers may consider evaluating whether brands need to change their product offerings to reflect the needs of today’s consumer, Brundage noted.

Once they’ve done that, marketers also recommend considering if their approach to advertising could use a shift first. “In my opinion, before approaching a rebrand, ask yourself, ‘Do I actually need the rebrand or are we just bad at awareness and upper-funnel marketing?’” Jun Poekert said.

For marketers who are looking at a rebrand to change how a brand is showing up in the market, the problem could instead be their media mix, Jun Poekert noted.

“You may not need a rebrand,” he said. “You just may need a better upper-funnel marketing strategy.”

If all of that still brings brands to the conclusion that a rebrand is necessary, Brundage advised reaching an understanding about what customer feedback really matters—and which opinions don’t.

“Know who you are, know who your customer is, don’t piss off your customer,” he said. “If you [piss off] someone that’s not your customer, you shouldn’t really care.”