Brand Love, Creator Trust, and Playing the Long Game at Cracker Barrel
In the latest installment of Linqia’s Culture Creators series, Liz Griffin, Senior Brand Partner at Linqia, sat down with Tori Poole, Senior Director of Brand Engagement at Cracker Barrel, for a wide‑ranging conversation on cultural relevance, creators, fandom, and what it really takes to grow a 56‑year‑old legacy brand.
Cracker Barrel is such a legacy brand. How do you think about growth without losing what makes it special?
Cracker Barrel is 56 years old, and if you line up 10 people, nine of them know what it is. We call it the Cracker Barrel lore. We’re kitschy, quirky, and experiential. We have rocking chairs, an old country store, and homestyle food. People are passionate about us, and there’s a lot of emotional connection and nostalgia to our brand.
What I love is that we let our community and our fans help determine who we partner with and what we spotlight. We think less about what we want to get across and more about making it everyone else’s Cracker Barrel.
How do you think about cultural relevance when social media is so niche and personalized now?
Trends aren’t universal anymore, what’s on my For You Page isn’t what’s on my social media manager’s page. Especially on TikTok, it’s very niche now. That’s actually a cool opportunity for a brand like ours because there are all these subcultures within Cracker Barrel…But we are not trying to be a meme brand. We’re not jumping on every single trend. We lean into crafted storytelling, heritage, legacy, and our employees. Fans will call you out when something is totally inauthentic.
How fast can you move on trends or ideas inside such a big organization?
I like to move very fast. I get energized by ideas and I will figure it out that day. We are a large organization with 70,000 field employees but we try to be nimble and take an approach of only doing things that are really a fit for Cracker Barrel. We focus on what’s authentic and what will matter to our fans.
Creators are clearly a big part of your strategy. How do you think about working with them?
They are your best resource. If you over-brief them or turn it into a traffic-driving, sales-driving-only initiative, like “get this point across, make this the hero,” you’re basically wasting money. Go run an ad.
We very rarely go, “Here’s a concept, execute it.” It’s more like,”‘What do you want to do?” I trust them more than I trust myself. I’m not a content creator. They know how to shoot, edit, and tell a story in the way they do.
What about the impact and the KPIs you have to prove back to your leadership team, in order to keep them investing?
We’re really lucky here, I have the most fantastic CMO, Sarah Moore. She’s a legend both personally and professionally for me, and we’re cut from the same cloth in the sense that she is a storyteller CMO. So you do not have to sell this stuff into her. She gets it. And I will say also our CEO Julie Felss Masino, who has a long background at Taco Bell, gets it too. So we can move faster.
However, there is still the broader marketing spend of core or traffic driving channels. Influencer can be harder to measure. But I’m the long-game girl. When I go talk to leadership, I remind them that you might not see a butt in a seat tomorrow, but over time we’re shifting perceptions and opening the aperture of the brand, so we will get that return.
What’s on your For You Page right now?
Currently it’s filled with quarter-zip matcha content. It’s iconic.
If you were a creator, what would your content angle be?
I’d like to think it would be very similar and reminiscent of MomTok with the Salt Lake City Mormon girls dancing and doing crazy stuff like that.
What advice would you give to someone starting their career in marketing?
Work harder than everybody else and put your head down and grind it out and do the best you can do. Hustle and let your actions and your work and everything shine for you and you’ll go far. And then I’d also say try different things and explore different things. Marketing is such a broad, almost buzzy, word and there’s so many layers to it … it comes in all shapes and sizes.
For more from our Culture Creators series, head here.
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