Inside the Clever Branding Strategy IHOP and Applebee’s Used to Triple Sales |
Inside the Clever Branding Strategy IHOP and Applebee’s Used to Triple Sales
How the chain restaurants teamed up to become two of the biggest brand winners of 2025.
BY ALI DONALDSON, STAFF REPORTER @ALICDONALDSON
Photos: Michael Rivera and Clotee Pridgen Allochuku via Wikimedia Commons
Are chain restaurants cool now? Apparently. Like every other vestige of early 2000s millennial childhood, people are feeling nostalgic for vinyl booths and laminated menus, so much so that the Harris Poll crowned IHOP and Applebee’s two of the biggest brand winners of 2025.
The breakfast and dinner sit-down spots, which have more than 1,500 locations respectively and are owned by Dine Brands, the $450 million publicly traded restaurant group, rank among the top 25 percent of all brands in the United States, according to data recently released by the global market research and consulting company and Bera, an AI-powered brand intelligence software platform it acquired in 2024.
The report singled out IHOP and Applebee’s for capitalizing on its overlapping customer base with a co-location strategy, reminiscent of the old school Taco Bell-Pizza Huts and the Taco Bell-Pizza Hut-KFCs. IHOP and Applebee’s parent company has started investing heavily in these dual branded restaurants and finding success doing so. The initial test location in Texas generated three times as many sales as the original single restaurant. After seeing those results, Dine Brands said it was on track to open 15 such locations by the end of 2025, effectively covering the entire day of eating from morning coffee and pancakes to late night chicken wings and mozzarella sticks.
Surveying nearly 20,000 people across the country, the report found that “besides the obvious operational synergy, there is a lot of synergy in how consumers view these two brands.”
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All of the Applebee’s customers surveyed—a rare 100 percent in polling—said they were aware of IHOP as a brand, and 91 percent said they would consider eating there. More than half responded that they had. That customer overlap, particularly with adults between the ages of 18 and 49, was the key to making that strategy work and becoming one of the biggest brand winners of the year.
“This alignment creates a simple and intuitive experience,” the report said. “Breakfast flows toward IHOP, and lunch and dinner flow toward Applebee’s.”
It’s a vision that was years in the making. The former CEO of Dine Brands, Julia Stewart, who stepped down in 2017, first worked at Applebee’s, where she served as the company’s president for three years. By Stewart’s telling, she left Applebee’s after not being promoted to CEO and went on to become the CEO of IHOP instead. Then four months into her new job, one of her employees told her that three quarters of the products that IHOP buys come from the same manufacturer as Applebee’s. That gave her the idea for IHOP to acquire Applebee’s, which the company did in 2007. Stewart recounted this tale of savvy corporate payback during an interview on the on the “Matthews Mentality Podcast” last April, and her story went viral.