📉 When a Logo Tanks Your Stock

Cracker Barrel Fumbled the Bag in More Ways Than One — Why One Hedge Fund Manager Will Do Anything to Get Drake's Attention

Author

Katie Perry
August 23, 2025

Welcome to Tuesday Thursday Saturday! Here, I share a snapshot of trending stories across business, tech, and culture, plus some updates from the daily financial news show I host. - KP

The Big Story: Marketing and Finance are On a Crash Course

Earlier this week, Cracker Barrel inexplicably removed the barrel from its logo and just about everything else in it, save for a more modern typeface and a mustard yellow hexagon. The advertising community had opinions, everyday consumers had opinions, and even Donald Trump Jr. had an opinion. (Even logos can be “woke,” I guess?)

Turns out, investors had opinions, too. The company’s share price tanked 13% in one day. $CBRL ( ▼ 0.25% )  

Was the market's knee-jerk reaction warranted? Has Wall Street become that fickle? Not quite. A lot of things had to converge to make something like this happen, and they’ve been converging for a while. We’re just now reaching a tipping point where it’s all becoming abundantly clear.

Pretty much everyone has a trading app — or two, or three — on their phone. People discuss stocks and companies in the same way they do their favorite sports teams. And they do this all within social media platforms built upon algorithms that prioritize big megaphones and spicy takes.

Moreover, the concepts of brands and marketing are much more universally understood than it was a decade ago. Madison Avenue is in our face, everywhere. Personal brands are a thing. Taylor Swift, the most famous person in the world, is seen as an HBR case study. It’s all marketing, baby.

But back when the only people who cared about the stock market were bankers, wealth advisors, and super-rich people, companies didn’t really need to worry about how shareholders “felt” about their brand. Were profits up? Costs down? Cash flow positive? Cool, take my money.

Perhaps the most striking example of performance mattering above aesthetics is Berkshire Hathaway, a ridiculously successful company steered by Warren Buffett that happens to have a website that has not been changed since maybe 1999. Seriously, go take a look. It looks like something I built with a Geocities pagebuilder at age 12. They’re still using Times New Roman. $BRK.A ( ▼ 0.64% )  

When you perform this well, graphic design can be an afterthought.

Of course, over time, Warren Buffett became the brand itself. They focused their “marketing” efforts on hosting an epic annual event for shareholders in Omaha. Shareholders packed into stadiums to hear from the Oracle itself. The website became an Internet artifact. If they changed it now, people would lose their minds.

Warren Buffett walked so that Jensen Huang could run.

Investor reaction to marketing moves can go poorly … or quite well. A few weeks before Cracker Barrel-gate went down, American Eagle Outfitters — which is actively trying to Abercrombie & Fitch itself back into cultural relevance — announced a massive new brand campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney. The trading community, still very much male-dominated, loved the move. AEO started to become a meme, despite data showing that foot traffic to its stores is actually declining. $AEO ( ▼ 2.72% )  

Pop Mart International, the company behind the global Labubu phenomenon, reported a 400% uptick in sales during their August earnings readout. The stock jumped 12% on the momentum, and news that new Labubu minis would be dropping soon. $PMRTY ( ▼ 1.3% )  

And La-Z-Boy, the nearly 100-year-old furniture brand, used precious real estate in a recent earnings report to highlight its own brand refresh. (This one, concocted by ad agency Colle McVoy, was received much better than Cracker Barrel’s.) $LZB ( ▲ 0.11% )  

“We also recently introduced our reinvigorated La-Z-Boy brand identity. Rooted in our heritage of comfort and craftsmanship, the new identity reflects a more modern brand and represents an important step in our journey to evolve with our consumer, further increase brand relevance, and reach a broader audience.”

Melinda Whittington, CEO via earnings call transcript

At the risk of oversimplification, as the audiences of people interested in the stock market change, so do the expectations placed on public companies. Back in the day, institutional investors and analysts really only cared about things like financial statements and SEC filings — which were all delivered in the same formats: text and barely-designed charts.

All companies need to formally file financial reports in a similar format (left), but companies like Coinbase are adding on infographics (right) to tell the story more engagingly.

But for many stocks today — especially those with consumer brands — the bar for “vibes” is higher. People want pretty IR websites. They want to see the CEOs of the companies they invest in on their favorite trading podcast. They want Alex Karp to go on TV and accuse Palantir short-sellers of being high on cocaine. $PLTR ( ▼ 0.99% )  

This isn’t to say retail investors don’t care about the underlying businesses of the companies they invest in. They, of course, do. But they care about other things, too — namely, marketing things. This is a big challenge for organizations in which the investor relations team reports into the CFO, and is more often than not, completely siloed from the company’s marketing function.

Put a different way, those creative and clever whippersnappers in the marketing department who are doing things like hiring Sydney Sweeney for brand campaigns, coming up with Instagram strategies, and designing beautiful landing pages don’t often interface with the financial comms pros and analysts that sit in the IR function. More often than not, they are from completely different worlds.

You can tell when these teams do collaborate, though, and it comes across in how ticker brands show up online. Newer companies, tech companies, they seem to get it more than others. Spotify has a pretty IR website, for example. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev makes it a point to jump on at least one retail investor show or podcast during each earnings cycle. (I interviewed him for Stocktwits earlier this year.) Snap’s shareholder newsletter goes out monthly, not quarterly, and in addition to financial updates, it includes product momentum and press stories.

Some companies are beginning to recognize the intrinsic link between consumer loyalty programs and shareholder engagement strategies. AMC was one of the first companies to offer its investors special perks redeemable in theaters. Stakeholder Labs, a tech and strategy firm backed by Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian’s VC firm, created a platform that makes it easy for companies to link up loyalty efforts with shareholder data to identify where the two groups intersect. Can you imagine a more loyal and valuable person than someone who is both a customer of your products and a shareholder of your stock? 

We had hedge fund manager and activist investor Eric Jackson join our morning show earlier this week to talk about his ideas for how to make his long-term vision for Opendoor a reality. He suggested making fundamental changes to their business model (dropping the capital-intensive iBanking business), bringing in fresh leadership (he wants ex-Uber founder and CEO Travis Kalanick), and … Drake.

Yes, the global hip hop superstar Drake. You see, Eric is from Toronto, and Drake is arguably the most famous person to ever come out of “the Six” as they call it. One day, while brainstorming ideas to make Opendoor go even more viral among retail investors, his 16-year-old son had an idea. Drake happens to live in their neighborhood. What if his dad went over with a sign, imploring Drake to buy one share of OPEN, and recorded it? The first video garnered more than 300K views on X. So they did it again the next day. And again.

Eric’s approach to rallying what he calls the “Open Army” involves the classic hedge fund stuff like calls for changes to the core business and to management, but it also has something new, and that is a compelling and well-executed content strategy. 

This new environment creates a ton of new challenges and opportunities for publicly traded companies. Corporate governance, which is typically reactive, must now coexist with proactive investor marketing strategies that require tools, talent, and data that haven’t always been accessible to IR. 

In many ways, the current shift in investor relations mirrors what companies went through with the rise of social media in the late 2000s. Back then, platforms like Facebook and Twitter were dismissed as niche or frivolous — until they weren’t. Suddenly, every brand had to decide not just whether they would participate, but how. Social wasn’t a siloed discipline; it touched customer service, marketing, communications, and even product. 

I think IR is at that same inflection point today. Digital channels, retail investors, and the blurring of brand and financial identity mean that investor relations can no longer live in a spreadsheet or a press release. It’s everyone’s job now.

I am writing a book on this topic that will be published by Wiley in Spring 2026. More to come on that front!

Daily Rip Live Recap: Why Hedge Fund Manager Eric Jackson is Standing Outside Drake’s House Like Lloyd Dobler in ‘Say Anything’

The hedge fund and Drake collab you didn’t know you didn’t know you needed.

Every weekday, my co-host Shay Boloor and I cover the biggest market news and events LIVE on Stocktwits’ morning show, The Daily Rip Live. On Thursday, hedge fund manager and activist investor Eric Jackson hopped on to make his case for Opendoor, an embattled post-SPAC stock that is the latest meme darling among retail investors. Opendoor’s former CEO resigned following heavy scrutiny, and the company is now searching for new leadership — and a famous new shareholder. $OPEN ( ▼ 9.38% )  

Here’s what we discussed:

⇢ 1:45 Eric says the “Opendoor Army” is everywhere: Sri Lanka, Uruguay, and even in my hometown of Syracuse, NY 🍊

⇢ 3:30 Why Eric had an early conviction in the stock back in 2022, and how it felt sitting back and watching it tank until earlier this year. Opendoor is a residential real estate marketplace that purchases houses, flips them, and resells via its platform. Unlike competitor Zillow, Opendoor is driven by the supply side — that is, people trying to sell their houses with fees lower than broker rates and greater speed.

⇢ 12:50 Why he's bullish now and why he thinks ex-Uber founder and CEO Travis Kalanick is the best person to right the ship. Eric holds a PhD in management, so he knows a thing or two about corporate leadership.

⇢ 30:24 We discuss why it might make sense for Opendoor to move on from the “flipping” business (known as iBuyer). Why? It’s extremely capital-intensive. Opendoor has to shell out a ton of cash to acquire and invest in these homes before they sell, which creates risk in a volatile housing market.

⇢ 36:24 I asked Eric if Opendoor has returned any of his emails or calls. He says no, but he has chatted with a few of them via DM on X.

⇢ 37:40 I asked Eric how the tepid housing market impacts Opendoor’s ability to succeed. Millennial homeownership is extremely low, interest rates remain high (although that can change), and so who is going to buy all these houses? He shares one rather radical idea to improve liquidity — “assumable mortgages,” which are currently only available to people in the VA program.

⇢ 43:12 Eric’s marketing manager, AKA his 16-year-old son, has an idea for how to rally Opendoor investors online: stand outside of Drake’s house with a sign imploring him to buy just one share of OPEN. The videos have gotten 100s of thousands of views.

⇢ 46:40 Shifting gears, we discuss the trend of crypto miners expanding to offer AI data centers.

⇢ 57:55 When dumpster diving in the stock market, how do you decipher trash vs. treasure? Eric shares his insights.

Now Here’s a Chart

If owning a home feels out of reach for millennials and Gen-Zers, it’s not all in their heads. This chart from Apartment List shows the staggering discrepancy in rates of home ownership at age 30 across the generations.

There are many factors at play, namely the increased cost of living, student loan debt, heightened interest rates, and homeownership no longer being perceived as the American Dream for young people today.

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Tuesday Thursday Saturday is written by Katie Perry, owner of Ursa Major Media, which provides fractional marketing services and strategy in software, tech, consumer products, professional services, and other industries. She is also the co-host of Stocktwits’ Daily Rip Live show.

Disclaimer: The contents here reflect recaps and summaries of pre-reported or published data, news, and trends. I have cited sources and context for the information provided to the best of my ability. The purpose of the newsletter is to inform and educate on larger trends shaping business and culture — this is NOT investment advice. As an investor, you should always do your own research before making any decisions about your money or your portfolio.