Declared Change Is Easy. Earned Change Is Rare.
What Starbucks, Chili’s, and Cracker Barrel Reveal About How Brands Actually Change at Scale
In the last few years, it seems like rebranding has become the default response whenever a large brand hits a wall so to speak. Their traffic trending slows, margins tighten, and the analysts begin to circle. A new CEO or CMO arrives with a mandate to “modernize the brand” and “get back to what made it special.” It’s a familiar script, but it can also be deeply misleading.
Most large restaurant brands don’t struggle because they failed to rebrand fast enough. They struggle because they attempt to change what the brand means faster than their systems, operations, and customers are capable of absorbing. And once that gap opens, marketing can actually become a liability instead of a lever.
At scale, rebranding IS NOT a communications exercise. It’s an identity decision, and one that carries structural consequences many of these organizations aren’t prepared to face.
Declared Change vs. Earned Change
There’s really a fundamental distinction that separates successful brand evolution from high-profile disappointment: declared change versus earned change.
Declared change is announced, while earned change is experienced.
Declared change shows up through leadership hires, press releases, refreshed brand imaging and language, and public commitments about “returning to our roots.” It signals intention before reality has meaningfully shifted.
Earned change moves in the opposite direction. Operations change first, product quality stabilizes, the core execution tightens, and consistency compounds. Only then does marketing begin to reflect what customers are already noticing. When marketing is asked to lead identity change without operational permission, that credibility erodes. Expectations rise faster than reality, and the brand begins fighting its own messaging.
Nowhere is this tension more visible than in restaurant and service brands operating at scale; where habit, memory, and system design carry enormous weight. Which makes Starbucks, Chili’s, and Cracker Barrel particularly instructive case studies.
Starbucks and the Cost of Telegraphing a Rebrand
The ongoing conversation around Starbucks illustrates the structural limits of declared change at scale.
The public narrative is familiar: the brand drifted, the experience eroded, and with the right leadership and cultural recommitment, Starbucks can reclaim what once made it special. The leadership hire itself became part of that story; visible, symbolic, and widely interpreted as a signal that the brand intended to change course. But the problem isn’t the pedigree. The problem is the implication.
Starbucks didn’t simply grow large. It literally industrialized a ritual. It transformed the café into a system optimized for throughput, predictability, and margin protection. Mobile ordering didn’t just change how customers buy coffee, it redefined stores as fulfillment centers first and social spaces second.
At that scale, many of the things people want Starbucks to “get back to” are structurally incompatible with the system that sustains it. The local texture can slow throughput, human connection resists efficiency standardization, and “craft” conflicts with volume pressure.
These aren’t cultural failures so to speak. They’re design tradeoffs.
When leadership signals a philosophical return to intimacy without dismantling the machinery that replaced it, marketing is left holding an almost impossible promise. Nostalgia becomes a story customers want to believe, but one the system can’t support in the current state.
Cracker Barrel and the Risk of Category Amnesia
Cracker Barrel offers a different cautionary tale, rooted not in nostalgia, but in misapplied category logic.
While a beloved brand by many, it’s been facing demographic pressure and slowing traffic (among other service issues). New leadership was tasked with driving growth and relevance. The response leaned toward modernization: menu changes, tone shifts, and a more overt attempt to attract new audiences. What was misunderstood wasn’t the data. It was the brand’s permission structure.
Cracker Barrel was never just a restaurant. It was a ritual brand. Customers forgave inefficiency, limited choice, and even inconsistency because the experience carried emotional familiarity and cultural meaning to them. It was never optimized for speed so much as optimized for comfort.
When brands built on ritual import growth logic from faster, more transactional categories, they often disrupt the very behavior that made customers tolerant in the first place. The truth is marketing can help modernize execution, but it cannot replace meaning. And once ritual is destabilized, the brand loses the forgiveness that once protected it.
Chili’s and the Power of the Quiet Rebuild
If Starbucks and Cracker Barrel demonstrate the risks of declared change, Chili's shows what earned change actually looks like. There was no announced comeback campaign or new brand manifesto. And there was no leadership roadshow announcing reinvention.
Instead, Chili’s spent several years doing unglamorous work: simplifying menus, fixing kitchens, improving execution, better ingredients, and rebuilding consistency. Progress wasn’t dramatic. It was incremental. And it took time.
Most customers couldn’t tell you when Chili’s got better. They can only tell you that it did, and that’s the point. Marketing followed reality. The brand didn’t ask for renewed trust, it accumulated it quietly. By the time the narrative emerged, the product had already earned permission. When new promotional offers were launched, customers were open to reconnect more with the brand.
The most credible rebrands don’t feel like rebrands at all. They feel more like consumer rediscovery.
Hooters and the Limits of Meaning Change
Hooters’ recently signaled repositioning will be an instructive test of a hard brand truth: meaning isn’t infinitely flexible.
Hooters was never shy about who it was. The proposition was clear, the experience explicit, and for a long time, the wings were legitimately good. That clarity created permission, and it also created memory.
Over time, as food quality declined and the experience got blurry, the brand began to lose both its product credibility and its identity anchor. What’s unfolding now appears to be an attempt to broaden the audience and soften the edges of that legacy. Whether that effort succeeds remains to be seen.
What history suggests, however, is that brands built on explicit meaning face a narrow path when attempting to reposition. Efforts to recast Hooters as something closer to a family-friendly destination won’t be judged as evolution so much as alignment; does the product, experience, and environment convincingly support the new promise? You can stretch relevance, but you can’t rewrite memory, especially if the core product no longer earns trust.
This is where marketing can reach its limit. Identity shifts of this magnitude can’t be “messaged” into existence. They have to be carried by tangible, sustained changes in substance. Otherwise, the brand risks asking customers to suspend disbelief rather than reward its new progress.
Why Rebranding Fails at Scale
Across QSR and casual dining, rebranding efforts tend to break down in predictable ways. It’s not because leaders lack a sense of urgency or creativity, but because rebranding is, more times than not, often asked to solve problems it was never designed to fix.
Marketing is frequently positioned as the compensating force for operational constraints; asked to smooth over throughput issues, labor realities, menu complexity, or structural inefficiencies. At the same time, leadership pressure to restore growth is often mistaken for permission to redefine identity, even when the underlying system hasn’t changed enough to support a new promise.
That’s where nostalgia enters the conversation. “Back to our roots” becomes less a strategic direction than a comforting narrative; a signal of discomfort with the present rather than clarity about the future.
Part of the confusion comes from treating distinct ideas as interchangeable. Rebranding is not repositioning. Repositioning is not reinvention. And reinvention, especially at scale, requires forms of subtraction most organizations are unwilling to consider.
Some challenges these brands face require deep understanding:
· You can’t promise intimacy without accepting slower throughput.
· You can’t promise craft without limiting scale.
· You can’t promise rediscovery while insisting on being everywhere at once.
It’s important to understand, these tensions aren’t matters of messaging or tone. They are design decisions, embedded in how the business actually operates. When those decisions remain unchanged, no amount of rebranding language can carry the weight being placed on it.
The Questions Marketing Leaders Should Be Asking
Before another rebrand initiative begins, marketing leaders should slow the conversation and ask harder questions like:
· What experiences can no longer be credibly promised?
· Where does scale now work against brand meaning?
· Which customer expectations are structural, not fixable?
· What is the brand finally willing to stop being?
Marketing’s strategic role isn’t to sell the comeback story. It’s to define the truth boundary the brand cannot cross, and to protect credibility when ambition outpaces the reality. I’m not talking about the “creative” execution. I’m talking about the sometimes-uncomfortable “strategy” work, that often runs counter to leadership momentum. But it is where the real value of marketing lives.
The Hardest Part of Any Turnaround
The markets and media love redemption arcs. We seem to love stories where iconic brands stumble, rediscover their soul, and emerge renewed. They make for satisfying headlines for us as humans.
In reality, most successful brand evolutions are quieter, less dramatic, and involve a lot of discipline. They acknowledge limits, prioritize coherence over reach, and accept that going “back” is rarely possible. They do this by getting intimate with the real data points, not what they want or hope to see.
The hardest part of rebranding isn’t deciding what to become. It’s deciding what you’re finally willing to leave behind.
The point here is that the restaurant industry can be brutal. The margins are sometimes razor thin, consumer preferences change, economic fluctuations effect dining frequency, but the truth is all restaurants face these same challenges. Some just adjust better.
Perspective by Clint Allen | President & Founder, CLINTONSCOTT
Feel free to share this with your social networks!