But this one’s ever-so-slightly different!

We’re piling on, but… 

The internet has caught fire. Shares in Cracker Barrel stock dropped a hundred million dollars. Like, in a day. Even politicians piled on.

That’s obviously the wrong kind of “incite.”

Of course, brands should want to incite. But not a shareholder panic, or a meme cycle that makes your CMO wish they’d lost their wifi for a month.

The right kind of incite sparks belief, pride, curiosity, appetite. It pulls people toward you.

Burger King did it with their retro refresh: they reimagined nostalgia, not erased it. Taco Bell inverted the QSR playbook by anchoring new experiences in “live más” first—and then figuring out how to scale it. Wendy’s mastered the snark, but backed it with quality cues so it wasn’t just attitude for attitude’s sake.

Here’s the bigger issue: this feels like a rebrand in search of a problem. The “insight” seems to have been our old logo doesn’t scale online. That’s a design task, not a consumer truth. A real insight (the kind that surprises you about the customer problem) would’ve fueled a story people could believe in. Without that, the void gets filled by everyone else. And suddenly your refresh is a culture-war football getting tossed around, with no winners but the meme-makers.

At S50, we believe branding isn’t decoration. It’s a promise. And of course, it can be a provocation—but it needs to have purpose. Inciting people to feel a certain way about your brand is important. The only question is whether it builds your brand… or burns it.