THE BRIEF
The World Cup opening ceremony shared its biggest moment with a stuffed monster. A fried chicken chain figured out the collectible toy game better than most toy companies have in years. And two brands told us exactly who they are, in opposite directions. One nailed it. One didn’t.
Let’s go…
ON THE AGENDA
A $150 plush monster just out-marketed FIFA’s opening ceremony.
Cracker Barrel’s stock jumped 30%. The real problem’s still there.
KFC put a mystery toy in a $30 bucket of chicken, and it’s smarter than it looks.
Coca-Cola’s AI ad got slammed again.
Etsy’s “be human” campaign has a marketplace problem.
THE LEAD
A Nine-Figure World Cup Budget Just Lost to a Toy.
FIFA lined up nine-figure sponsors for the 2026 World Cup. Adidas, Coca-Cola, Visa, Budweiser, names you’d expect from a tournament this size.
The opening ceremony was in Mexico City on June 11, and the moment everyone’s talking about is a stuffed monster. Two Labubu figures, dressed in World Cup jerseys, walked out during the ceremony as part of an official partnership between FIFA and Pop Mart. Labubu also shows up in the tournament’s official theme song video, and there’s a “Copa Labubu” collection now, with figures running around $150 each.
Most people see this as a fun crossover and move on.
They’re missing that Pop Mart’s stock is down 40% from its peak. The brand’s spent the last year fielding questions about whether Labubu was a one-hit wonder. The World Cup opening ceremony put Pop Mart’s biggest character on the biggest stage in sports, in front of a global audience.
This is Pop Mart writing its next chapter on FIFA’s stage. The toy’s the headline. The timing is the real story.
THE RUNDOWN
Cracker Barrel’s Stock Jumped 30%. The Real Problem Didn’t Change.
Cracker Barrel’s Q3 numbers beat Wall Street’s lowered expectations this week, and the stock jumped close to 30% on the news. Revenue was still down 2.9% year over year, but after a year of logo headlines and a reversed rebrand, “better than feared” was enough to send shares to their highest point since before the whole mess started.
The thing to remember: Traffic is still down almost 7% since the logo flip-flop. The stock recovered. The customers didn’t.
KFC Put a Mystery Toy in a $30 Bucket of Chicken.
KFC’s Supergirl tie-in launched this week with a $29.99 “Krypto Collectible Bucket” and a set of blind-bagged keychains, the kind where you don’t know which character you got until you open the bag. It’s the first collectible push at this scale KFC’s done in 20 years.
The thing to remember: The blind bag is the same trick that built Pop Mart’s whole business, and it just landed in a bucket of fried chicken.
Coca-Cola’s AI World Cup Ad Got Slammed, Again.
Coca-Cola’s new World Cup spot, “Uncanned Emotions,” leans on AI-generated visuals of cans tumbling, opening, and spilling. Critics called it flat and generic, with nothing that actually shows the game or the fans.
The thing to remember: This is the third year running Coke’s put AI front and center in a major campaign and caught backlash for it. Three times stops being a misstep and starts being a habit.
Etsy’s New Ad Says Choose Human. Its Marketplace Says Good Luck.
Etsy launched “Celebrate Being Human” this spring, a campaign built around the idea that in a world of automation and algorithm-fed sameness, handmade and personal still matters. The timing lines up with two straight years of Etsy losing active shoppers.
The thing to remember: Etsy’s own sellers have been saying for years that the platform’s filling up with the same dropshipped goods from the same overseas suppliers as everywhere else. The ad is selling an Etsy a lot of people on Etsy don’t think exists anymore.
BRETT’S TAKE
The Logo Was Never The Problem.
Cracker Barrel flipped-flopped on its logo back in August. This week the company posted a stock jump on better-than-feared earnings. Traffic is still down almost 7% since the whole logo fiasco.
Etsy launched a campaign built around being human and handmade in a world of sameness, the same season its own sellers keep saying the platform is full of dropshipped crappy goods from the same overseas suppliers as everywhere else.
Both companies treated the visible thing as the problem. Cracker Barrel changed a logo, then changed it back. Etsy ran an ad about its values. Neither move touches what’s actually driving the numbers underneath. The food and shopping experience at Cracker Barrel, or the actual mix of what’s for sale on Etsy.
A stock gain and a nice ad both look like progress. Attention and sentiment do matter. They just don’t show up the same way in a same-store sales report six months later.
If the thing driving customers away is the product itself, no logo change, no reversal, and no campaign will fix anything. It just buys another quarter of good headlines before the same number shows back up.
Fix what customers feel before you touch what they see. Lead with that, and the logo, the campaign, the branded merch, lands a lot harder.
THE PITCH
A rebrand that doesn’t fix what’s actually driving people away is an expensive new coat of paint. Cracker Barrel just proved it again and the traffic problem is sitting exactly where it was before any of it started.
Before a logo, a tagline, or a deck gets touched, it’s worth knowing whether the thing customers are reacting to is even visible from the brand side in the first place. That’s what a Brand Friction Audit is for, find the real problem first, so the rebrand isn’t just a nicer-looking version of the same mistake.
Reach out. We’ll put one together for you.
That’s it for this week…
Thanks for reading. Comment below and share far and wide.
P.S.
Last week I gave out $6,000 in scholarships to six graduating Mahwah High School seniors (I’m the President of two non-profits). Been doing this for several years now, and it never stops being one of my favorite things all year. Whatever these six do next, I hope they remember that they have a whole community rooting for them.
See you next week.
