My brother texted me a photo of an IHOb sign in June with three question marks and nothing else attached. I sent back a burger emoji. At that point there was nothing else to send.
The b has flipped back to a p now. Sixty years of pancakes, restored, and the trade post-mortems arrived faster than the new signage did. Burger sales reportedly up several times over. Billions of earned impressions. Every brand account with a social manager and a Tuesday deadline got a free joke out of it, and Wendy's got the best one.
It worked. That is the uncomfortable part.
IHOP could afford to rent its own name out for a month because nobody, at any point, was actually confused about what IHOP is, and that is the one condition almost none of the brands about to copy this can meet.
Sixty years of unambiguous meaning were sitting in the account before anyone drew up the stunt. The joke read as a joke only because the real thing underneath it was immovable. Take a brand whose identity is already soft, already three-quarters explained by its category, flip its name for a month, and you have not made a joke. You have made an announcement nobody asked for.
A stunt is a withdrawal, and you can only withdraw against a balance.
Two other things IHOP had that the imitators will skip. Reversibility: the change lived on signage, on social, and in a press cycle, not on the incorporation papers. They could walk it back in four weeks with no scar tissue. And a product: there were actually burgers. The stunt pointed at a real thing on a real menu, which is the whole difference between a campaign and a prank.
Here is the part that gets lost in the impressions math. The mockery was the mechanism, not the failure. Denny's and Arby's have spent years teaching this industry that getting dunked on is a distribution channel, and they are right, and it is still a channel with a weight limit. You get one of these. Maybe two. The third time, your audience stops reading it as play and starts reading it as flailing.
What I expect this fall is a run of second-tier brands doing name flips with nothing banked and nothing to point at, followed by a run of case studies explaining why it did not travel. The answer will be simple and nobody will enjoy it. They did not have sixty years of pancakes.
A stunt is a withdrawal, and you can only withdraw against a balance.
Truffles knocked a pen off my desk while I was writing this and Barnaby watched him do it, which is roughly the engagement most of these stunts have earned. I stand by the burger emoji.