Robert Iger returns as Disney CEO, as Bob Chapek is ousted

November 22, 2022

On Sunday night, November 20, Walt Disney’s board of directors CEO Bob Chapek with Robert Iger, the company’s former chairman and CEO who left the company at the end of last year, reports The Wall Street Journal.

“The board has concluded that as Disney embarks on an increasingly complex period of industry transformation, Bob Iger is uniquely situated to lead the company through this pivotal period,” said Susan Arnold, chairman of Disney’s board, in a statement.

“We thank Bob Chapek for his service to Disney over his long career, including navigating the company through the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic,” she added.

The surprise change comes at a tumultuous time for Disney.

This month, the company reported weaker-than-expected fourth quarter financial results—killing the momentum built up over a strong year that saw record revenue and profits in multiple divisions, especially the one that includes theme parks.

Disney’s theme-park business has recovered strongly since the coronavirus pandemic shut down its venues across the world, but the division continues to subsidize widening losses in the streaming video business.

Chapek has said repeatedly that he expects the streaming business to be profitable by September 2024. In the most recent quarter, however, it lost $1.47 billion, more than twice the year-earlier loss.

The company also cautioned that its profitability target would only be met if there weren’t a significant economic downturn—the first time it has added such a caveat. Disney’s stock price shot up 9% to more than $100 a share in premarket trading early Monday. Some observers said the management change might benefit the company’s stock.

In anemail to employees Sunday night, Iger said he was returning to the company.

“It is with an incredible sense of gratitude and humility—and, I must admit, a bit of amazement—that I write to you this evening with the news that I am returning to the Walt Disney Company as chief executive officer,” he wrote in the email, which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Several top Disney executives first learned the news that Iger was returning after they read his Sunday email, while some of them were together attending an Elton John concert at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles that was streamed live on Disney’s flagship streaming service Disney+, according to people familiar with the matter.

Chapek also was expected to attend the event and the company had planned for him to introduce Elton John from the stage before the concert, according to two people with knowledge of the plans, although it isn’t clear if Chapek actually was there, they said. Other Disney employees said they were baffled by Iger’s Sunday email and immediately began asking if the message to employees was real or if it came from a hacked email account.

Negotiations between Iger and the board to return as CEO were initiated only in recent days, according to a person familiar with the talks. Iger has said publicly on at least two occasions over the past year that he isn’t interested in returning to Disney. In recent months, he has focused on investing in and advising startups, particularly in the technology industry.

Adding to the surprise, Chapek, who has served as CEO since February 2020, over the summer saw his contract renewed through the end of 2024. At the time,. Arnold, the board chair, said that while the company was “dealt a tough hand by the pandemic,” Chapek “not only weathered the storm but emerged in a position of strength.”

Wells Fargo analyst Steven Cahall wrote in a note to clients: “Iger will be viewed as a catalyst to improve the content aspects of Disney, and we expect bigger potential strategic changes around the long-term shape of” the streaming business.

Chapek couldn’t be reached for comment.

Research contact: @WSJ

September 4, 2024

Sizzler is a bit of an anomaly: Despite having shrunk to a fraction of its former size and retreating primarily to the West Coast, it’s a brand that remains a ubiquitous cultural touchpoint—in movies and online, on South Park and Saturday Night Live. And even if you’ve never eaten at one, you probably know what it is.

This made it a dream client for Mike Perry, founder and chief creative officer of Tavern, which collaborated with the beloved yet beleaguered chain on a comprehensive brand refresh spanning from its website to its stores, reports Fast Company.

“This brand is weirdly working backwards—it exists within the mind, but not necessarily in the world or in the hand,” Perry says. “It’s the most fun to take the brand that has been beaten up for decades and restore it. It’s not fun to take the shiny one and push it a little further.”

Digging into Sizzler’s past

When it launched in 1958 in Culver City, California, Sizzler helped invent the casual dining chain restaurant. It had its ups and downs over the years, but for an eatery known as much for its endless salad bar (which accounts for 40% of its business) as its affordable steaks, a global pandemic was not a great development.

The chain filed for bankruptcy in September 2020 and has been building back since. Today there are 75 locations (down from 270 at Sizzler’s peak). Christopher Perkins—formerly of Anheuser-Busch InBev—joined in 2019, and is now president and CEO.

Perkins says the brand had lost its way, and he knew it needed more than just a new coat of paint. He aspired for Sizzler to become a brand not locked in the past, but rather one of Southern California’s regional landmarks, like In-N-Out Burger, or Wawa on the East Coast.

In addition to losing its way, Perkins discovered that Sizzler had also lost its history, quite literally—there was no robust archive of assets and other ephemera. So he began to do a bit of archaeology into the company’s past, at one point sending a marketing intern on missions to the brand’s storage facility to see what could be dug up.

Prior to launching Tavern, Perry had worked on the Budweiser account at Jones Knowles Ritchie, which is where he originally met Perkins. Once Tavern came on board the project, Perry and Perkins immersed themselves in all things Sizzler—from store walk-throughs to the corporate side of the business—and did a bit of brand excavation of their own, buying up everything they could find on eBay.

In the end, Tavern saw the solution to Perkins’s problem as a “modern heritage” approach.

“It’s the search for timelessness,” Perry says. “The real tension between modernity and heritage and finding that is taking the old and ultimately making it new—and making it new so that it can continue to work in the future …. If you’re always trying to balance that, that’s really where the good stuff starts to come out.”

A cast of characters

One archival find was a steak-shucking bull character rendered in a Hanna-Barbera-esque style, which they dubbed Ribby Ribeye.

“All great brands have characters,” Perry says. “[Ribby Ribeye] is exactly what embodies a famous Southern California brand from both the midcentury and today, and it seemed like a no-brainer to bring back.”

Tavern built out a supplementary cadre of characters representing the brand’s other best-known offerings—the cheese toast, the unlimited shrimp, a lobster tail; and Perry’s favorite, the Salad Barbarian, an amorphous blob on a plate representing all the goods available at the beloved bar.

For the brand’s fonts, Tavern again turned to the past. Perry says Sizzler had used cuts of Windsor and Caslon Black Swash from its beginning through the mid-’80s or so, and they felt very Southern Californian in design and aesthetic, so his team utilized Windsor EF-Extra, Emfatick NF (a take on Caslon Black Swash), and Block Berthold Heavy and Condensed. For a contemporary feel, all the elements are blended with modern messaging and photography.

Tavern was given a mandate not to mess with the logo, so the team only slightly messed with the logo. They essentially cleaned it up—ditching the black background and dialing it back to a single color; refining the type in minute ways, and flattening it out. They also slanted it at an angle to drive home the notion of the brand’s cattle-brand element.

The Sizzler glow-up

Of course, all of these aesthetic updates mirror larger—and perhaps more consequential—changes. Tavern also worked on the restaurant interiors, uniforms, the living “brand” of how workers talk and embody the restaurant (think Chick-fil-A and all those “my pleasures”), the plates, and more.

It’s safe to say that if you stepped inside any of the competition in the category—Outback, Chili’s, Applebee’s, etc.—in the absence of a logo, you’d probably have no definitive idea of where you were. They all tend to look more or less the same: dark environments, menus with food shot on dark backgrounds, which Perry says doesn’t exactly convey freshness or taste.

So, the team sought to separate Sizzler from the rest of the pack by resurrecting the brand’s ownable red color, aiming for a bright and friendly overall vibe. The new website is now live, and Perkins says the changes will be rolling out to physical restaurants in phases.

In many ways, the rebrand is an attempt to remind the world that Sizzler is an anomaly. It exists in a space between chain restaurant and steak house, not to mention past and present. As for the future, the team says the key to all that nostalgia not feeling dated is to maintain a constant understanding of what is culturally relevant today—and then looking to the brand’s heritage and seeing what resonates with it.

As always, time will tell. For now, Perry says, “[After working] on big brands, we get bored of the brand a lot faster than the consumer. And just frankly [with Sizzler] I’m not—and that’s what I think a successful rebrand is.”

Research contact: @FastCompany