In the Age of Bots, Bullying, and Brand Warfare, CMOs Need an Updated Brand Playbook
When any opportunist with an X account can engineer brand outrage, bots can hijack narratives, and a single influencer can dictate your brand’s success or failure, marketing leaders must recognize that the stakes for brands and those who steward them have fundamentally changed.
In what looks to be a frenetic 2026, brand leadership has become a minefield. For CMOs, the challenge is no longer building brands just to drive growth. It’s also protecting and navigating the brand from what, at times, feels like a never-ending onslaught of digital slings and arrows.
We speak from experience
Throughout 2024 and 2025, our firm, Prophet, partnered with Cracker Barrel on a comprehensive brand transformation effort, grounded in deep consumer insight, a strong strategic foundation, and extensive testing. But, when the new brand identity with logo was introduced, it became the target of politicized backlash driven by ideological influencers, activist investors, and bot networks.
What should have been a moment of progress, pride, and momentum on the path to uncommon growth quickly turned into a political hot potato. Understandably, the client pulled back on its brand evolution efforts and, by extension, some of its broader business transformation aspirations. Like most legacy brands, Cracker Barrel still faces real pressure to grow, and it is to be seen which aspects of its transformation strategy ultimately endure and which stay on the cutting-room floor.
The lesson here isn’t that transformation is too risky or that brands should avoid bold moves. At a time when consumers expect brands to be relevant, responsive, and meaningful, standing still is often the bigger risk. The real lesson is that CMOs need to respond to a new context into which brands reposition, relaunch, or transform. Three ideas that we are integrating into all of our brand work include:
1. Own the 360-degree consumer—and the forces that shape them
Understanding the consumer has always been the CMO’s job. But today, that understanding must go beyond preferences and behaviors to include how brand actions might be misread, distorted, or weaponized.
The next time you roll out a change (e.g., a new logo, a refreshed customer experience, or a creative campaign), ask yourself: What are my most important audiences going to see? What will they celebrate? What might they misread? And who might exploit the changes to advance other agendas?
In our Cracker Barrel work, we relied on thousands of data points and conversations with consumers. We pressure-tested everything. And still the rollout got derailed. Why? Because knowing the customer today also means anticipating how narratives can be hijacked.
Owning the consumer in 2026 means planning for nuance. It means weighing not just upside across segments but downside risk as well, and ensuring the intent behind brand decisions doesn’t get lost once they leave the boardroom.
2. Be the guardian of your brand’s narrative
There was a time when brands could tell their own story, at their own pace. That era is over. Today, narratives are shaped and reshaped in real time, often before brands have a chance to respond.
Even modest changes can trigger outsized reactions. In this environment, brand launches are no longer purely creative events. They are potentially public moments of reckoning, and they require as much rigor as any corporate endeavor or announcement. The story you want to tell must be shaped, tested, and reinforced from the inside out before someone else tells it for you.
Clearly, this is not an argument for silence or timidity. CMOs should absolutely author this narrative and be the ones to pressure test it, internally and externally, recognizing that the sequencing of the launch matters. Test rigorously. Build credibility. Align stakeholders early and often. Earn proof points. Then roll out and scale with purpose on your terms.
3. Prepare your CEO to be the champion of change
For many companies, the CEO has become the most visible embodiment of the brand. That makes the alignment between marketing, brand building, and executive leadership buy-in non-negotiable.
CMOs must ensure that their CEOs (and leadership teams) are fluent in the “why” behind the brand transformation well ahead of launch. When there is daylight between what a brand’s ambition and plan are and how a CEO represents the same, that gap creates risk and invites scrutiny.
Additionally, media prep is no longer just a PR function; it’s a brand imperative. The CMO must be the connective tissue between strategy and be the spokesperson, the embodiment of the brand and where it is heading. As CMO, you need to be thinking about both a world-class brand activation and ensuring your CEO can clearly articulate not just what is changing, but why it matters.
Tied to points 1 and 2, your and your CEO’s preparation must also include a clear-eyed view of risk. Traditional “disaster checks” are no longer sufficient. Scenario planning across cultural, social, and political dimensions needs to be embedded into the brand process from the start.
The book we need to write
Love it or hate it, we did the Cracker Barrel work by the book: The business case. Rigorous insights. Rich creative exploration. Consumer input. But in this new reality, that book is simply out of date. It needs new chapters that account for sentiment sensing, scenario and risk planning, cultural flashpoints, social media manipulation, and real-time response.
This is not a temporary political moment. It is the landscape in which brands now operate. The brands that succeed will be the ones that adapt without abandoning their principles, and without losing control of their story.
Scott Davis is Chief Growth Officer at Prophet.
Peter Dixon is Executive Creative Director at Prophet.