IHOP says fake name shift to ‘IHOb’ risk worth taking
IHOP spoon-fed the world a short explanation for why it underwent a fake name change last month, when it briefly called itself IHOb.
“We take our burgers as seriously as our pancakes,” it said, explaining why it substituted a “b” for burgers for the “P” for pancakes in its name.
But while its president has no doubts, the company has yet to disclose whether its gambit, which promoted its lunch and dinner business, enhanced its bottom line.
Five weeks after the promotion, IHOP President Darren Rebelez was candid about the reasons behind the shift in an interview.
The company has not been as popular with the lunch and dinner crowds, even though it’s open 24/7. No surprise there: IHOP is a shortened version of the original name, the International House of Pancakes.
“We just didn’t put the focus on” lunch and dinner “that we needed to,” Rebelez said.
More than half of IHOP’s sales totals come from breakfast, analysts say. For sales from dinner, that number is 16 percent. To remedy this, IHOP decided to “go fish where the fish are,” Rebelez said.
And the rest was history. From a tweet flipping the “P” with a “b” on June 4 to officially shifting to IHOb the next week, IHOP launched its offensive.
Burgers are the most-ordered entree in restaurants nationwide, according to the chain’s president, and IHOP opportunistically hopped onto the meaty item’s popularity wave.
This marketing campaign is neither IHOP’s first time selling burgers nor its first attempt at shifting consumers’ fo- cus to dinner items. The company has sold hamburgers since its conception 60 years ago, and it has previously tried promotions and menu switches to cater to a nonbreakfast crowd, according to Raymond James analyst Brian Vaccaro.
Past marketing campaigns did not generate the same level of buzz, though. Rebelez said that for IHOP to successfully double down on lunch and dinner audiences, it needed to get people to think of IHOP as a “player in the burger business.”
IHOP’s efforts did not go unnoticed. The social media campaign received more than 30 billion media impressions and was the topic of 20,000 news stories, according to Rebelez.
And, according to YouGov, which tracks the perception of more than 1,500 brands daily through its Brand Index, IHOP’s Word of Mouth score rose from 19 percent to 30 percent in the week following its announcement.
Though Rebelez declined to comment on IHOP’s sale of burgers and total earnings, he hinted the company’s new burger line has been a success.
“If you’re going to grow your business, you have to take it from somebody else,” he said. “Somebody else out there lost a burger sale.”