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Marketing Brew

Katie Hicks

marketingbrew.com

A conversation with Sweetgreen’s chief brand officer, Nathaniel Ru

Despite growing nationally, Ru told us the brand’s goal is to keep it local.

Ryan Barwick

How Nike’s iconic Bo Jackson campaign came to be

A new biography of the athlete details his work with the brand.

So you want to bring a product back?

How General Mills used online clamor to fuel a Dunkaroos return.

three examples of what a customized Eliqs beer can look like

Illustration: Dianna “Mick” McDougall, Photos: Eliqs, Getty Images

Brands

A cartoon image of Kristina Monllos created by Morning Brew

Kristina Monllos

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.”

How the rebrand became part of the culture wars

With Cracker Barrel and Jaguar at the center of political firestorms, marketing experts say brands are taking extra care before making changes.

Dave Mead, chief marketing officer and co-founder of the Austin, Texas-based sparkling mineral water brand Rambler, thought he had landed on the perfect social video idea.

The plan was to outfit an old Jeep with the water brand’s logo and current tagline (“Chug Life”) and send it soaring off of a cliff in Glacier View, Alaska, as part of an annual Fourth of July car launch, recording the whole thing for social media. The hope was to make something entertaining enough to gain enough attention online and grow the brand’s social following while boosting brand awareness as Rambler moves into more markets nationally.

Leading up to the event, Mead said, he was feeling nervous about what might go wrong.

“I had butterflies because we only get one chance,” Mead told Marketing Brew. “What if there’s a clog in the fuel line? What if it dies and it just coasts over that thing and then just rolls down and is anticlimactic? Everybody launching a car there has the same dream and the same vision of launching their car farther [than] anybody.”

The Jeep didn’t end up going farther than anyone else’s car that day, and it didn’t end up soaring over the cliff at all. Instead, the car veered left and drove straight into two trees, taking them down—and, with them, Rambler’s carefully laid social content plans.

“I just thought, ‘I cannot believe we just spent months planning and preparing and spent all this money getting up here, and I have no car launch,’” Mead said.

The team didn’t linger on the failure for long—when they returned to Texas, they pivoted to sending water as part of relief efforts for the July 4th floods in Kerr County, Texas. After a few weeks passed, though, the team revisited the footage and tried to figure out if anything was salvageable.

Instead of chucking it altogether, Rambler’s marketing team ended up releasing the failed car-launch video. To do so, Rambler partnered with a viral fail video page, Send It, which has nearly 800,000 followers on Instagram, to spin the brand’s marketing failure into the social moment Mead wanted.

The team eventually recognized “that we were sitting on some gold,” Mead said. “There were 38 cars launched, 37 of them were successful, and they’re all the same. They’re all similar. Ours was unlike anyone else’s.”

Rambler is primarily focused on event sponsorship to get its cans of sparkling water into the hands of potential customers, and it’s using the moment to boost digital marketing efforts like it had initially planned—with some additional changes. Rambler paired a giveaway with the release of the car-launch video, offering those who like, follow, tag friends, and share the video a chance to win a free trip to Alaska for two and $500 worth of gear from Send It—to help boost interest in the spot.

“The intention was to go create some wild content, but not just let it live in our feed,” Mead said. “We’re gonna go create something cool, something wild, that people are gonna want to see, and that’s going to increase our following.”

Screenshots from Rambler Austin's Instagram of a car falling of a cliff and a station wagon on a forest road.

What happens when your social stunt goes terribly wrong?

Water brand Rambler wanted a viral car-launch video, but had to pivot after the car veered off course.

An all-too-literal guillotine league. Chainsawed sandwiches. A moshpit diaper.

Those aren’t just random words jumbled together to test your reading comprehension—they’re the outcome of recent brand collaborations with Liquid Death.

The canned-beverage brand has been inking more than 

 in the last year, striking deals with a bevvy of other big names, including Yahoo Sports (the aforementioned guillotine league), Sheetz (chainsawed sandwiches), and Depends (moshpit diaper), all of which are shown off in splashy social posts.

“We hope to be one of the better things in your feed,” Dan Murphy, SVP of marketing for Liquid Death, told Marketing Brew.

While collaborations are nothing new, the strange humor that’s a feature of Liquid Death’s brand mashups certainly

stands out. To understand what goes into partnering with Liquid Death, Marketing Brew caught up with Murphy to get a sense of the process.

 stage,” according to Murphy, who said that he has some 73 brands interested in partnering currently in his inbox. “We’re going to go into the Liquid Death world,” Murphy said of the reasoning he sees, “and we’re going to get exposed to this new audience.”

For interested brands, Liquid Death has a big stage to offer. Since its founding in 2018, the brand has built a dedicated fanbase on social media, with 7 million followers on TikTok and 7.3 million followers on Instagram. Murphy says the brand regularly earns more than a billion media impressions each month, all while keeping costs relatively low.

“We’re very much an influencer,” Murphy said. “We ended [2024 with] over 30 billion [earned media impressions], and that was on a spend of—I’m talking every production dollar, every talent fee, because we work with celebrities too—that was under $2 million.”

While the details of each brand partnership deal vary, Liquid Death’s typical arrangement when partnering with a brand is to contribute whatever creative that its five-person, in-house team lands on. The company generally asks that its brand partner cover “hard costs” of production, as well as the marketing budget and media resources that could include anything from influencer spend or light paid spend behind the campaign, Murphy said.

When considering partners, the most important factor is if the brand looking to link up is “aligned with our creative sensibilities,” Murphy said.

That likeminded spirit was what attracted Sheetz, a convenience store brand that operates its own irreverent social presence, to promote its recent partnership with Liquid Death, Ryan Sheetz, executive vice president of marketing and supply chain at Sheetz, told Marketing Brew.

“We have a lot in common, right? Both very bold brands, both very high energy brands, but both brands who really like to have a lot of fun,” Sheetz said.

For one day in late July, the brands offered Sheetz customers a new, if unconventional, way to slice their sandwiches: with a chainsaw. And no, it wasn’t just a lark just for social media; some 150 patrons in Cranberry, Pennsylvania, got to see their sandwiches chainsawed in half.

The whole endeavor required an unconventional setup.

“It took a lot of preparation and planning to make sure our store teams were well set up and we had all the proper safety and organizational measures in place,” Sheetz said. “We had a brand-new kind of food-safe blade that was put on the chainsaw, and we used food-grade lubricant instead of petroleum-based oil. I learned a lot about chainsaws that I never thought I would need to know.”

Jeremy Ekes, VP client strategy and services at January Digital, said Liquid Death’s built a reputation for unique partnerships where marketers are willing to take a leap, making its particular creative sensibility stand out in a landscape where 

“Generally, there’s probably few and far between in the industry,” Ekes said. “Probably a handful of brands you can think of that have the right to own that space, Liquid Death being one of them.”

Those kinds of out-of-the-box partnerships and unexpected creative aren’t solely for entertainment. Through all of its partnerships, Liquid Death is aiming to continue to boost its brand awareness—while educating consumers about what the brand offers, especially as its product lineup expands.

“We are talking more about product benefits than we have ever before,” Murphy said. “I think we found we had this great awareness number, and especially being a young company, but at least a third of those people still thought we were a beer or maybe an energy drink, so we had to work a little harder to make sure that message comes through.”

A woman holds a Liquid Death X Sheets branded chainsaw that she's just cut a sandwich with and it's splattered sauce on her face.

Want to partner with Liquid Death? Get in line 

The beverage brand’s strange humor and social fanbase has dozens of brand marketers vying to partner up, its SVP of marketing said. 

The outdoors aren’t all sunshine and roses. There’s snakes, storms, and vultures—and even deep canyon crevices you could fall into and maybe have to 

At least, that’s the story of the outdoors that Columbia Sportswear tells in the company’s latest 

The new campaign, called “Engineered for Whatever,” is an “intentional swing” for the brand to portray the unpredictability of the outdoors this way, Columbia Sportswear’s SVP and head of marketing, Matt Sutton, told Marketing Brew. The spot, from adam&eveDDB in London, has been in the works for the last year, Sutton told us, and it’s an effort for the brand to stand out from other outdoor apparel category brands, which often embrace classic outdoor imagery.

“Our brief was a slide with six images from competitors on a slide,” Sutton said. “You block out the logos and they all looked like they were from the same brand: Perfect sunny sweeping vistas, pristine conditions, very serious models. And the insight in our brief was that over the past 20 years, the outdoor category has kind of converged, and all follow each other and do the same thing.”

 To cut through the sea of sameness, Columbia took inspiration from the brand’s past work by Gert and Tim Boyle, the mother-son duo behind the company, and who formerly starred in ads that tested product quality in extreme, zany situations in the ’90s and early 2000s. In one ad from that time period, Tim hangs from a cliff clutching the brand’s jackets; in another, he trudges through a carwash wearing a parka and a fleece.

Columbia’s new 30-second ad is designed to serve as a table-setter to reintroduce the brand ethos, but Sutton said Columbia created new product tests spots similar to the ones the Boyles’ previously made. Those spots, which put gear up against a helicopter drop, a snowplow, and a massive snowball, will roll out later this month and into the fall.

For the brand reset, Columbia polled target audiences to find the consumer insight that even professional athletes are anxious about what can go wrong outdoors, be it extreme heat, wet, rocky or slippery terrain, or something else altogether.

Rather than ignoring those fears, the company aimed to address them head-on with new work touting the capabilities of its products.

“That insight to us was like, ‘Oh, this is an opportunity for us to establish the problem that you’re talking about and show how you can triumph with our product,’” Sutton said.

In its first quarter 2025 earnings, Columbia reported that it would withdraw its financial outlook for the full year amid tariff uncertainty. Even so, Tim Boyle, chairman, president, and CEO said in a statement at the time that Columbia was “committed to increasing investments in demand creation” with new products and a new marketing campaign.

While Sutton declined to share ad spend figures for the new brand campaign, he noted that “it’'s a meaningful increase in our overall marketing spend.” The company is also shifting more ad dollars to spend on brand marketing and is making “probably our most significant investment in five years in brand,” Sutton said.

The investment during a challenging year for many retailers is a recognition that the company can’t change the way that people see its brand without making a meaningful investment in brand marketing and storytelling.

“Our intent with this is to reintroduce and shift consumer perception of Columbia,” Sutton said. “We have a really strong performance marketing business, but we can’t shift perception with performance marketing. We have this first shot in nearly a decade of having a defined brand and a voice. And so we’re using it as an opportunity to reset and challenge new and existing customers’ expectations of Columbia.”

Outdoorsman Aron Ralston is featured in Columbia's new brand campaign

Why Columbia leaned into Mother Nature danger to reintroduce the brand

The brand took inspiration from ads from the ‘80s and ‘90s where zany stunts proved product durability.

We’re talking, of course, about the “dream” of content creation, posting content, gaining a massive following on social media, getting a ton of brand deals, and quitting your 9-to-5. Someone might see it as a fool’s game when watching the backlash that one creator, Connor Hubbard, or @hubs.life_, has faced over the last few months.

Hubbard, dubbed “the most boring man on the internet” last year by 

 (1.4 million) for his mundane day-in-the-life videos that, as 

 reported, drove “the internet insane.”

“Most of the world is working,” Hubbard told GQ last May, theorizing why his content 

 had become so popular. “They have to work for a living. They can’t all be influencers.”

 become an influencer. And in February of this year, Hubbard followed the now familiar trajectory, 

 his 9-to-5 to become a full-time content creator, transitioning from what had made him famous to yet another influencer without a traditional day job. (Hubbard did not respond to Marketing Brew’s request for comment.) Since then, Hubbard has faced backlash from his fans for no longer being “

.” There’s even a new content cycle from other creators, 

 what went wrong—a “downfall” that some say “

Hubbard is one of a number of content creators who’ve followed this trajectory, pivoting from a part-time influencer (who has a normal job) to a full-time content creator, dependent on brands and algorithms for income. It’s a difficult transition for any creator to manage, one they should approach with a plan to guide audiences along on the journey, according to influencer marketing and ad agency execs.

While the appeal of content creation can be a sense of freedom and the possibility to create and make money doing so, what’s happening for Hubbard is a reality check that there are boundaries—even for the creator economy.

“It’s a good reminder that if you’re a creator, if the ultimate goal is to work for yourself, you have to work for your audience,” Oliver McAteer, partner and head of development at ad agency Mischief, said. “You do have customers out there, so to speak, consumers that know you for kind of one thing. So it does kind of narrow you or limit you to how far you could go.”

McAteer has experienced limits with his own content. Two and a half years ago, McAteer started to document his experience as a first-time dad on his personal TikTok account called 

. With that page, which has 28,000 followers, he experimented in switching up the content, running a series about being a Brit in America. “Whilst [that] had a life of its own, my followership stalled, and it has stalled to this day,” McAteer said. “And that’s because I tried to change my content and do something a little bit different.”

Doing something different isn’t inherently bad. Creators can and do need to adjust their approach to content creation as they see fit, but their audience may have a reaction to any changes. It’s all a matter of how creators manage a shift in their approach to the content.

“If you think of it more like I’m switching up my content and I’m making a major life change—there’s always a risk with that; a lot of times, that risk pays off,” Mae Karwowski, founder and CEO of influencer marketing agency Obviously, said. “Your audience truly has a parasocial relationship with you, and they really feel like they know you really well if you’re doing a good job, so you really need to understand and be very thoughtful about how you make a transition.”

Karwowski believes that creators should think of themselves as akin to magazines. For instance, Karwowski posited that if Vogue started posting 

 out of nowhere, its subscribers would probably unsubscribe. Creators making a stark transition in content should consider a scenario like that and think about what followers might want from them, she said.

For creators, it’s not just a matter of whether or not they’re making audiences happy. There’s a ripple effect: “You as a creator should be taking cues from your followers,” Christina Goswiller, SVP and head of social transformation for Digitas, said. “Ultimately, they’re the ones who are engaging with your content, [determining] the performance of your content, which then determines brand deals and your livelihood.”

If a marketer was looking to work with a creator because of their specific type of content and the audience they’ve cultivated, but then that creator makes a change, they could end up losing out on future brand deals.

Marketers may want to “reevaluate that partnership,” Goswiller said, adding that it depends on the longevity of the relationship.

And even if a creator wants to quit what made them successful, it can be smarter to stick with what has worked, Karwowski said. She shared a parallel of a successful small-town content creator who moves to LA, and “then the lifestyle creep is so real, and now it’s just LA influencer content,” she said. “I always advise, if you don’t have to move, [don’t].”

Hubslife backlash is a reminder that audiences can be fickle

Transitioning from the content you're known for isn't as easy as it seems. 

Kelsey Sutton

Each week, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself 

Brittney Polka is VP of ready-to-drink beverages at Danone North America, where she oversees brands like Evian, Stōk Cold Brew Coffee, and International Delight Iced Coffee. She’s also overseen Danone brands like Horizon Organic, and she previously worked at Mars on brands like Skittles and 5 Gum.

 The Stōk Cold Brew partnership with Wrexham AFC is easily one of my favorite projects, as a self-proclaimed Wrexham fangirl. Last year, we became the first-ever stadium sponsor of Wrexham’s Racecourse Ground (now named the Stōk Cae Ras | Stōk Racecourse) just in time to celebrate the club as it rejoined the English Football League after a 15-year hiatus. In a 

, club owners Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney secretly replaced the team’s traditional afternoon tea with bold and smooth Stōk Cold Brew Coffee to see if the team would notice—they were surprised, to say the least. We took this partnership a step further this year, debuting an 

 that shamelessly challenged traditional American football culture with Sir Anthony Hopkins. When personal passions and work projects come together, it makes it even more worthwhile. We continue to work with Wrexham on this partnership, and I’m excited to see how it will continue to evolve.

 at the big game this year. Who wouldn’t want to see Tom Brady, Ben Affleck, and Matt Damon dancing around in neon tracksuits? And, at Danone, we make Dunkin’ Extra Extra and Dunkin’ Salted Caramel creamers, so it was fun to see the brand in the limelight in such a fun way.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: 

I’m a proud mom to my five-year-old daughter James (the seventh James in a row and first girl) and two-year-old son Bennett. While I’m a Midwesterner at heart, I now live in the Denver area and love walking amidst the mountains or sipping a beer in the Colorado sun.

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? 

I’m most excited to see so many brands doing more and more that looks like anti-marketing: integrating into life seemingly more effortlessly and moving away from more traditional methods, and I especially enjoy those brands that don’t mind poking a bit of fun at themselves in the process! Any time you can tell the creatives weren’t allowed to unleash the full potential of an idea into the world, I find myself yearning for more.

What’s one marketing-related podcast/social account/series you’d recommend? 

My audio time is sadly filled with lots of Disney playlists and parenting podcasts, and my social habits don’t look a lot different, but I never miss an episode of 

She’s also overseen Danone brands like Horizon Organic, and she previously worked at Mars on brands like Skittles and 5 Gum. 