Your CMO just burned $100 million on a logo change.
The board is demanding answers. The stock price collapsed. Social media is on fire. And your Chief Marketing Officer is explaining why "the market just wasn't ready for our vision."
Sound familiar?
Welcome to 2025's greatest hits of branding failures. Jaguar. Cracker Barrel. Disney's Star Wars collapse. Over $1.2 billion incinerated. Not by incompetent marketers. By personality-driven executives who violated the most basic strategic principle: Principles Before Personalities.
I survived the International Harvester to Navistar collapse. I watched Illinois Bell implode during the AT&T breakup. I configured Y2K disaster recovery systems at 50% capacity because I knew what happens when executives prioritize ego over infrastructure.
Twenty-five years in Fortune 500 trenches taught me one thing: The worst failures come from CMOs who can't separate their personal brand from business strategy.
And 2025 just gave us three perfect case studies in marketing campaign failures.
Here's what the branding failure examples of 2025 have in common:
Not gender.Not industry.Not budget size.
Personality type.
Every single branding fail from this year traces back to one root cause: ambitious executives who substituted personal vision for strategic infrastructure. They prioritized making their mark over making money. They confused artistic expression with business outcomes.
The Myers-Briggs assessment we used at executive boards calls this "personality-driven decision making." Recovery coaching calls it "violating Principles Before Personalities."
Wall Street calls it a $1.2 billion disaster.
The Damage: 97.5% sales collapse. From 67,000 units to just 49 vehicles registered across Europe in April 2025.
The Executive: Gerry McGovern, Chief Creative Officer. A designer who described the Jaguar rebrand as "exuberant modernism" and told journalists his team "had not been sniffing the white stuff."
When your defense of a branding failure starts with "we're not on drugs," you've already lost.
McGovern's personality type screams artistic visionary. Nothing wrong with that—if you're running an art gallery. But Jaguar isn't selling paintings. They're selling $120,000 luxury vehicles to a heritage-obsessed customer base.
The rebrand featured:
McGovern prioritized his creative legacy over customer research. He built "exuberant modernism" while the market wanted British sophistication. He deleted the iconic leaping jaguar logo—the brand's most valuable visual asset—because it didn't fit his personal aesthetic.
The pattern: Personality before principles. Vision before validation. Ego before evidence.
Accenture Song, the agency that orchestrated this disaster, got fired in May 2025. But the damage was done. Jaguar stopped selling cars entirely in the UK. Sales collapsed 97.5%. The rebrand that was supposed to "reclaim originality" instead destroyed $400 million in brand equity.
This is what happens when you hire a CMO based on their portfolio instead of their strategic infrastructure.
The Damage: $100 million market cap loss in 8 days. Complete reversal and public apology.
The Executives: Julie Felss Masino (CEO, ex-Taco Bell) and Sarah Moore (CMO, ex-MGM Resorts).
Two ambitious executives brought in to "modernize" a 55-year-old heritage brand. Both with impressive corporate pedigrees. Both completely wrong for the assignment.
Masino came from Taco Bell, where breaking tradition is the business model. Moore came from MGM Resorts, where luxury means eliminating anything that feels "old." Together, they decided Cracker Barrel's iconic "Old Timer" logo needed to die.
Their reasoning? Highway billboard visibility.
That's not strategy. That's rationalization.
The personality pattern here is classic: high-achieving executives who measure success by transformation, not preservation. They see "legacy brand" and think "opportunity to make my mark." They confuse modernization with obliteration.
The new logo was generic. Sterile. Forgettable. It could have been Panera Bread. Or any other casual dining chain desperate to appeal to younger demographics who weren't coming anyway.
Within 8 days, the backlash forced a complete reversal. Donald Trump Jr. called it out. The Democratic Party called it out. Activist investor Sardar Biglari calculated $1.2 billion in destroyed shareholder value.
Masino and Moore weren't incompetent. They were the wrong personality types for the strategic challenge. They prioritized their vision of what Cracker Barrel should be over what the brand actually represented to customers.
The lesson: A resume full of transformational success stories is a red flag when you need someone who can preserve and enhance, not reinvent and replace.
The Damage: $250-300 million Galactic Starcruiser loss. The Acolyte canceled after one season. Indiana Jones 5 bombed at $384 million on a $300 million budget. Star Wars franchise value in free fall.
The Executive: Kathleen Kennedy, Lucasfilm President since 2012.
This is the big one. Not a single rebrand, but thirteen years of systematic brand destruction driven by one executive's unshakable commitment to ideology over audience.
Kennedy's personality type is missionary. She sees Star Wars as a vehicle for social messaging. She prioritizes representation over storytelling. She dismisses criticism as toxicity from a "male-dominated fanbase".
When The Acolyte—a show designed to be "queer-centric" according to showrunner Leslye Headland—failed spectacularly, Kennedy blamed the fans. Not the strategy. Not the execution. The fans.
This is personality-driven decision making at its most destructive.
The numbers tell the story:
Kennedy has been renewed three times—2018, 2021, 2024. Disney keeps her despite catastrophic failures because she represents their corporate values more than business outcomes.
The brutal truth: When executives prioritize personal ideology over customer value, you don't get brand evolution. You get brand extinction.
Here's what my Level C certification in Myers-Briggs executive assessment taught me:
Personality type predicts decision-making patterns. Artistic visionaries like McGovern prioritize aesthetic coherence over market research. Transformational leaders like Masino and Moore prioritize change over continuity. Ideological missionaries like Kennedy prioritize messaging over audience.
None of these are inherently bad. They're just catastrophically wrong for certain strategic challenges.
The problem? Most boards hire CMOs based on:
Nobody's assessing whether the executive's personality type matches the strategic challenge.
You wouldn't hire a trauma surgeon to do reconstructive plastic surgery. Same medical degree. Completely different skill sets.
But boards do this with CMOs every single day.
Private equity and venture capital firms spend millions evaluating acquisition targets. They audit financials. They assess market position. They analyze competitive threats.
But they're flying blind on the executives who'll determine whether the investment succeeds or fails.
The questions nobody's asking:
This is the diagnostic gap that's costing institutional investors billions.
In recovery coaching, we teach a fundamental principle: Principles Before Personalities.
It means your personal feelings, ego, and vision don't override proven strategic principles. It means you don't sacrifice what works for what feels innovative. It means the mission comes before your desire to make your mark.
Every branding failure in 2025 violated this principle:
Jaguar: McGovern's artistic vision before customer research Cracker Barrel: Masino/Moore's transformation agenda before brand equity Disney/Star Wars: Kennedy's ideological mission before audience service
They prioritized personality over principles. Vision over validation. Legacy over leverage.
And it cost $1.2 billion.
I survived 25 years of corporate collapses by learning to spot strategic blindness before it destroys shareholder value. The pattern is always the same: ambitious executives with no measurable infrastructure.
Here's what they were missing:
Does the CMO's personality archetype match the brand's DNA? McGovern was an artistic disruptor trying to lead a heritage preservation challenge. That's like hiring a demolition expert to restore the Sistine Chapel.
Does the CMO have strategic infrastructure beyond personal vision? Masino and Moore had transformation experience but zero preservation methodology. They knew how to disrupt. They had no framework for enhancement.
Can the CMO prove ROI on past initiatives with measurable outcomes? Kennedy has spent thirteen years at Lucasfilm. Show me the business case for any decision that didn't start with "representation." You can't. Because she measures success by ideology, not outcomes.
These three diagnostics—Archetype Alignment, Leverage Fortress Index, and LCO Efficiency—form the foundation of executive assessment that actually predicts performance.
While researching branding failures, I found the CMO Council. A peer-supported organization where CMOs vote on their own standards. It's like Congress voting themselves a raise.
No objective diagnostics. No measurable accountability. Just marketing executives protecting marketing executives.
This is why 78% of CMOs are scrambling to prove their strategic worth. They've been operating in an echo chamber where impressive narratives replace measurable infrastructure.
PE/VC firms betting millions on these executives have no diagnostic framework to separate personality-driven vision from strategic capability.
Until now.
If you're a PE/VC partner evaluating CMO performance, you have three options:
Option 1: Keep hiring based on resumes and hoping personality matches strategic challenge. (Current $1.2B failure rate suggests this isn't working.)
Option 2: Spend 6-12 months learning Myers-Briggs assessment, brand strategy diagnostics, and executive personality evaluation. (You don't have time for this.)
Option 3: Use a diagnostic framework that's already encoded this knowledge into measurable outcomes.
The CMO Score does exactly what PE/VC firms need: It evaluates CMO candidates across the three pillars that predict success or failure.
Not past performance stories. Not industry connections. Not charisma.
Measurable strategic infrastructure:
This is the diagnostic that would have flagged McGovern's artistic ego before Jaguar burned $400 million. It would have identified Masino/Moore's transformation bias before Cracker Barrel lost $100 million in market cap. It would have caught Kennedy's ideological prioritization before Disney destroyed Star Wars.
Here's what 2025's branding failures teach us:
Ambitious executives with impressive narratives destroy more value than incompetent ones. Because incompetent CMOs get fired quickly. Personality-driven visionaries get renewals, board support, and years to systematically dismantle brand equity while calling it "transformation."
The worst problem is the one you don't see coming.
And right now, PE/VC firms are hiring CMOs with zero diagnostic framework to assess whether personality matches strategic challenge.
The CMO Score gives institutional investors what they've been missing: objective assessment of strategic infrastructure before you bet millions on an executive hire.
$1,500 for a comprehensive diagnostic across three performance pillars. Compare that to the $100 million Cracker Barrel lost in 8 days. Or the $400 million Jaguar incinerated on "exuberant modernism." Or the billions Disney destroyed chasing ideology over audience.
This isn't marketing assessment. This is risk mitigation.
For PE/VC firms evaluating CMO candidates:The CMO Score prevents the personality-driven disasters that destroyed $1.2 billion in 2025. Three pillars. Measurable outcomes. Strategic infrastructure that separates vision from delusion.
Because the next Jaguar-level disaster is sitting in your pipeline right now. An impressive resume. A transformational narrative. And zero strategic infrastructure to prevent catastrophic failure.
Stop Reading. Start Seeing.
— Charles K Davis
Fractional CMO/CTO
"Your Marketing Consultant Is Lying To You"
Evaluate Your CMO Candidates With The CMO Score
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P.S. If you're a CMO who thinks this article is too aggressive, you're exactly who this is written about. Executives who prioritize principles over personalities don't get defensive about diagnostic frameworks. They welcome objective measurement. If you need validation instead of evaluation, you're proving my point. PE/VC firms betting millions can't afford your ego.
Keywords: branding failures, marketing campaign failures, branding fail, branding failure examples, rebranding disasters, CMO assessment, executive personality types, brand strategy, PE investing, venture capital, fractional CMO
Fractional CMO & CTO | Empowering $1M-$10M manufacturers, logistics, service, and retail leaders to transform brand crisis into revenue engines. While others panic, my clients thrive.
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