I still remember how my parents reacted when I told them I wanted to switch my college major junior year. It was an uproar. I found out the hard way that there’s always considerable risk when debuting a “new you.” In a way, it’s the same kind of risk companies face when rebranding.

This week, Tim Calkins offers advice on how to prepare your team for those risks, using Cracker Barrel’s rebrand as an example.

Plus, research from James Schummer on preventing people from bending the rules.

When brands meet backlash

Change is always hard. And given today’s polarized culture, coupled with social-media outrage, a small spark of controversy can spread like wildfire.

Look at Jaguar’s tumultuous 2024. Or the derision laid on “MS Now” this past August. Remember Bud Light’s Dylan Mulvaney campaign? Marketing can escalate into a full-blown culture war. But fear not, careful planning can help, according to Kellogg’s Timothy Calkins. He dissects the Cracker Barrel kerfuffle and offers guidance for marketers and leaders.

When Cracker Barrel realized it was in a slump, they decided to roll out a big program: renovations, an updated menu, and a new logo. The last part is where things really started to backfire.

“I don’t think anybody anticipated that something like this would blow up in the way that it did, and it blew up so fast and with such a level of emotional intensity,” says Calkins. Could marketers have anticipated this?

Not entirely. It’s hard to predict what might cause this kind of reaction or what might trigger an influencer. “As a marketer, all you can do is be very thoughtful about what you’re doing and then be very clear on how you’ll respond,” Calkins says. “And if you think that out ahead of time, you can be ready to move quickly, because speed is everything in situations like this.”

It’s also critical to get your team ready. Calkins suggests that Cracker Barrel didn’t have enough support. TikTok supercharged the dislike of the logo, and the food chain was left without allies. “You want to have 5,000 influencers out there who love Cracker Barrel, who are saying, ‘We love the fact that this company’s investing in this brand and fixing things up and investing for the future,’” says Calkins. “Companies need to be very proactive at managing influencers.”

In the end, we live in an attention-driven economy. So when everyone was talking about the logo, Cracker Barrel listened and pulled back. And just days ago, they parted ways with their design team. If there’s a silver lining to backlash, Calkins says, at least Cracker Barrel was able to get some feedback and ideas from all the negative attention.

Read Calkins’s interview at Kellogg Insight.

If people game the system, rewrite the rules

When there’s crowding around a limited, desirable resource, it becomes less accessible to everyone. This happens all the time in the world of organ transplantation. When organs are in short supply, some transplant surgeons order certain medical treatments or interventions to bring their patients higher up on waiting lists, even when the treatment might not be essential.

The intentions may be good, but the consequences can be severe.

New research from Kellogg’s James Schummer offers a strategy that may help: allocate a small fraction of organs that would normally go to the highest-risk patients and offer them to lower-risk patients instead.

Schummer tested the idea using a mathematical model of patients, doctors, treatments, and a planner in charge of allocating donor organs. He found that a planner could always find a sweet spot where, even if a fraction of organs was set apart for lower-risk patients, all the patients in the system would have a better chance of receiving an organ.

In other words, this approach would always deliver better results than the conventional method of only prioritizing the highest-risk patients. It would also reduce the likelihood of doctors trying to game the system.

So, could this be applied to real-world scenarios outside of healthcare? It depends. Schummer states, “how you adapt this model to any given application requires a lot more work—but this opens the door for other researchers to do that.”

Read more at Kellogg Insight.