My phone did the thing it only does a few times a year. Four people who do not know each other sent me a screenshot of the same tweet within an hour.
IHOP is changing its name to IHOb. The b is not explained. That is the entire announcement.
By this morning the b was a national parlor game. Breakfast. Burgers. Biscuits. Bacon. Brunch. Other brands piled into the replies before lunch, which is the 2018 version of a crowd gathering because a crowd is gathering.
The tease works because it withholds the one piece everybody needs to finish the sentence, and because a pancake company has permission to be ridiculous that most brands will never have.
Take those in order, because the second one is where people get this wrong.
The gap is engineered well. One unknown letter is small enough that everyone feels qualified to guess and closed enough that nobody can be right. A vaguer tease produces a shrug. A more specific one gets solved in twenty minutes and dies. A single letter is the sweet spot, and I do not think they found it by accident.
The permission is the part you cannot copy. IHOP sells pancakes at two in the morning to people in various conditions. Silly is already inside the brand, so silly costs it nothing. Run this exact stunt from a regional bank and you get a week of people asking whether anyone is minding the deposits. Before you steal a tactic, check whether you have the standing to use it.
And the cost was almost zero. They changed a letter, not a business. No repositioning, no menu overhaul yet, no capital committed. If the reveal lands badly they will be IHOP again by August and the whole thing becomes a trivia question.
Before you steal a tactic, check whether you have the standing to use it.
Which brings me to the part nobody is saying while the guessing is still fun. Attention is not preference. All of this is a loan against the reveal, and the reveal is still a week out. If the b turns out to mean something that fits sixty years of pancakes, they convert. If it turns out to be a category the brand has no business entering, everyone who spent a week playing along gets to feel a little used, and that feeling attaches to the logo, not to the joke.
Attention is easy to buy for a week. The bill comes due on the day you explain yourself.
At karaoke Tuesday the host who calls everyone baby held the slip in his hand and refused to read the title for a solid thirty seconds. The room got loud. Then it was Africa, and the room got quiet, because obviously. Withholding always works. What you do with the room afterward is the actual job.