When Radio Takes Advantage Of Another Brand's Tsuris

Yiddish, a lingual mashup of Hebrew, German, and Aramaic is one of the great languages ever invented. It’s guttural, expressive, and so many of its words sound like their meanings.

Unfortunately, my entire Yiddish vocabulary is maybe 20 or so words—but they’re good ones with wonderful utility to many of life’s everyday situations. And if you’re a regular here at JacoBLOG, you’ll match my knowledge and command of the language in no time. It will no doubt come in handy during department head meetings, budget projections, and creative brainstorms.

The “Yiddish word of the day” today is one of my favorites because it is so descriptive of many aspects of our lives. “Tsuris” (TSOOR-is) is a wonderful catch-all word that loosely translates to angst, discomfort, and the troubles in our lives. There’s tsuris in our jobs, especially with the people we work with and work for, not to mention the external tsuris from complications from things like tariffs, regulations, and rules. There’s plenty of tsuris at home from our partners and children. And the tsuris in our walls—when an appliance craps out, mold is discovered in the attic, our car is dented in a parking lot (no note, of course), or the neighbor’s tree hit your home during last night’s storm.

Dysfunctional relatives, whiney co-workers, annoying neighbors, psychotic home owners associations, the IRS—all abundant tsuris sources.

So, now that you get the concept (just don’t tell me about YOUR tsuris—I don’t have time for it), the silver lining in the tsuris cloud is that it can sometimes work for you and your brand IF you’re prescient and smart enough to seize the moment and put a little tsuris to work for you. More on that in a few paragraphs.

The source of said tsuris is the incessant rebranding and logo “refreshes” brands somehow can’t resist. Why is it that competent marketers lose their minds when it comes to renaming or even evolving existing brands?

And what’s fascinating about the recent violators is that not only have they set their brands back, they’ve also played right into the rampant political weaponization that’s so prevalent in our world.

And that was the theme last week for two well-known brands, each doing an incredibly good job of offending their core fans.

First, the long anticipated rebrand for MSNBC cable news channel which will be splitting from parent NBC News later in the year.

Their new handle?

MS NOW

The original name included the MS for Microsoft, a founding investor. But the newest incarnation of the channel has nothing to do with the computer software giant.

Instead the letters now stand for (…wait for it…):

My Source | News | Opinion | World

Seriously, each word separated by a “|.” Now try to type those five words with the vertical bar in the middle. It’s cumbersome. Plus, where does “world” fit when you’re talking about “news” and “opinion.”

And what does the “MS” mean?

Then picture the new brand name being said several times an hour by anchors, reporters, and the inevitable Mr. Big Voice on produced promos and identifiers.

While the new name was ridiculed by the right, who can’t stand the channel or its politics to begin with, it was pilloried by its own followers— and for good reason.

But as lame as the MSNBC replacement, it can’t touch the latest Cracker Barrel kerfuffle. (No, not a Yiddish term but an aggravating word of Scottish origin).

Cracker Barrel’s new logo treatment has blown up all over the World Wide Web, reminding us that bad high-profile decisions are sure to be trashed all over the internet. On that, you can count on millions of social media users to take brands to task.

As Tanya Gazdik reported in MediaPost, much of the pushback on the clean new logo with no barrel or old white dude, came from MAGA World, even Don, Jr. who viewed it as the brand “leaning into diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.” Not where you want to be if you’re Cracker Barrel.

In that context, many—including activist Robby Starbuck—believe the new logo is “woke” because it appears to be a sanitized (I can’t call it “whitewashed”) version of the familiar original. And then there’s the investment community, which also punished Cracker Barrel for its new logo treatment.

Yep, they went woke and their stock is a disaster. Not at all surprising tbh.

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) August 23, 2025

And this new take on the old Cracker Barrel visual identifier is being backed with considerable marketing firepower, part of a “larger $700 million transformation plan to shake off its stodgy image and lure in new diners.”

Based on reaction to this cleaner logo, Cracker Barrel may have a hard time hanging onto its P1 diners.

So what gives? Brands modernize their logos all the time, including bigger corporations than Cracker Barrel. In particular, logo evolutions are common for mega-brands like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and many others.

Of course, the subtle tweaks a brand like Coke implements is part of a well-thought-out process, undoubtedly accompanied by audience research to track customer perceptions and other variables.

What excuse could MSNBC and new parent, Versant (another head-scratcher, but another topic for another day) possibly have for their lame new moniker?

As many of you know, I’ve conducted more focus groups than probably anyone over the decades, mostly for radio. They serve as a great early warning system for bad creative, poorly formed content, and a great tool for identifying when management dreams up an idea that runs at crosscurrents to the brand’s essence.

In the case of both MSNBC and Cracker Barrel, there’s no excuse for the marketing brain trust to hit the iceberg head on. But that’s exactly what each brand managed to accomplish last week.

These debacles should serve as reminders to brands and their ad agencies what happens when you fail to deal the audience into their plans. Mistakes like this are avoidable.

Assuming they’re mistakes. That’s exactly what former broadcast radio executive, Dan Mason, questioned the other day on LinkedIn. Dan asked whether Cracker Barrel is playing the sly fox role, manipulating the players on the board by creating a logo they will soon eliminate with a swift mea culpa and then go back to the drawing board to cook up something else.

Dan wondered on LinkedIn whether this entire marketing sequence wasn’t an elaborate ruse on Cracker Barrel’s part to earn all this organic attention:

As conspiracy theories go, this is an elaborate, multi-layered shell game, designed to garner all sorts of free PR for a brand that has been long in need of a new approach. But something like this Cracker Barrel “logo-gate” seems ill-conceived and sadly typical of how brands often screw up what was initially a good idea gone very bad.

But there may be a silver cloud for a radio station, specifically Zimmer’s KCMQ in Columbia, MO. Their morning show, “Shags & Trevor,” wasted little time in parodying Cracker Barrel’s whacked-out logo snafu: