How a Pancake House Flipped to Burgers

Twitter got in a few good jabs, but IHOP got the last laugh when its fake rebrand quadrupled its burger sales.

Goal

People joke that nobody goes to Hooters for the wings. It’s a tongue-in-cheek quip about the staff’s dress code, but wings are, in fact, the breastaurant’s featured menu item. The same can’t be said about hamburgers at IHOP. Nobody goes to the International House of Pancakes for the burgers—right?

Burgers have actually been on the IHOP menu since the restaurant opened 60 years ago. IHOP ran previous campaigns to hype their burgers, but the brand couldn’t build the momentum they wanted for their so-called p.m. menu items. Plus this latest iteration of burgers—called Ultimate Steakburgers—were a little more special: These were 100% USDA choice, Black Angus ground beef patties that are smashed on the grill to sear before being tucked into a brioche bun. They deserved an extra-special campaign.

Action

IHOP’s new line of burgers may be fancier, but they were entering an already crowded market. “It had to be something that was bold,” says IHOP CMO Brad Haley. “It had to be something that was disruptive because A, we wanted people to know that we have this new line of amazing burgers and and B, it had to shake people up to get them to think a little bit differently about us, this House of Pancakes that actually now sells a really good burger.”

Haley says a few people in the company kicked around the idea of flipping the “P” in IHOP to a “B.” They presented the idea to their agency, Droga5, who ran with it.

The campaign was broken into two parts, the first being a week of teasers. The brand released video on social and traditional media that showed the IHOP logo on a white background, with the uppercase “P” in flipping to a lowercase “b.” The clip included a hashtag and announcement date, but little more information was offered. “That was really all it was,” Haley says. “And that generated enough interest in what the heck was going on with IHOP that it started trending.”

Media outlets picked up the story, doing man-on-the-street interviews asking the public what they thought the “B” could represent. Haley says the company also got reports of office pools and radio contests about the mystery “B.”

“There was this gamification aspect to it,” he says. “That was by design. It was all around this notion of making this fun and funny, with a wink and a nod so that people would have fun playing along with us.”

There was potential for the secret to get out. To prepare for the big reveal, IHOP sent signage to its franchisees, and some restaurant staff did try and leak the news early. To further muddle the list of possibilities, IHOP posted photos on social media for fake “B” menu items, such as bagels and beer (although the latter does actually exist: IHOP partnered with Keegan Ales brewery to make a pumpkin spice pancake stout in 2018, called IHOPS).

The second stage of the campaign was the reveal. At the corporate level, team members changed their LinkedIn profiles to say they worked for IHOb, and some even pulled the theme through to their titles, such as chief burger officer. “We had our letterhead that we pushed out with our press releases (reading) IHOb as well,” Haley says. “Even that was a wink and a nod: The logo looked like someone used Wite-Out to change the ‘P’ to a ‘b’ and used a blue Sharpie to change the logo, so even if someone looked close enough they’d (wonder), ‘Are they really serious or not?’”

Signage was also changed at one location in Hollywood, California—or, as Haley puts it, the restaurant was “completely burgerized.” Even the restroom names were updated, to “bur-guys” and “bur-gals.” This restaurant rebrand drew enough tourist interest that the franchise owner has opted to retain many of the burger-themed changes. The burger-fication wasn’t as overt in other stores, although Haley says they received a lot of interest from signage companies wanting to participate in the rebrand. A typical IHOP restaurant advertised the campaign via merchandising and menu changes. 

The second part of the campaign, post-reveal, lasted about four weeks. The company officially said its name change was a joke in an advertisement of its 60th anniversary promotion. Sung to the tune of “Happy Birthday,” the lyrics go:

IHOP’s turning 60

With a pancake party

And yes we said IHOP with a P

Because the B was just a stunt.

Results

“IHOb is the guy who gets a face tattoo of the girl’s name after 1 date”

“Well, IHOB seems like a really smart idea, since there are so few places to get burgers.”

“You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become IHOB”

“it sounds like iHop has a cold! I hobe it gets better soon”

“Nobe.”

Twitter certainly had its opinions. In fact, the IHOb reveal was the No. 1 national Twitter trending moment that day, beating out net neutrality and the North Korea-U.S. summit. “We knew that there would be some blowback from some people, because anytime there’s something that’s this disruptive, you’re going to get some people that are confused by it,” Haley says.

Other restaurant and food brands got in on the joke on social media. Hot Pockets posted a photo of its logo reading “Hot Bockets,” Burger King changed its Twitter icon to “Pancake King” and Whataburger tweeted, “As much as we love our pancakes, we’d never change our name to Whatapancake.”

Despite all the internet razzing, the campaign had notable results: In the first 10 days, the rebrand accumulated 1.2 million tweets, more than 27,000 earned media stories, 42.5 billion impressions and more than $113 million in earned media value. Haley says IHOP quadrupled burger sales at the peak of the campaign, and sales are still double what they were before the rebrand fake-out.

Research firm YouGov wrote a report on the campaign (unsolicited from IHOP) about the brand’s ad awareness. Data from YouGov BrandIndex showed the June 11, 2018, rebrand announcement saw the number of U.S. adults talking about the restaurant increased from 19% to 30%, as of June 18, 2018, marking IHOP’s highest word-of-mouth score since YouGov began tracking the company in 2012. 

It was a win for the brand, either in spite of or because of the massive social media response. “It was all fun stuff,” Haley says, although he never got around to burger-fying his professional title on LinkedIn.