Getting Extra Casual
The Rise of Virtual Brands in the Evolution of Casual Dining
The Hitten Snooze Melt. Ok… The Pizza Quesadilla. Ok what… The Whiskey Glazed Bird Dog… Ok what the f**k. These are three offerings from three different major restaurant chain’s experimental digital brands. From Denny’s “The Melt Down”, IHops “Super Mega Dilla”, and TGI Friday’s “Conviction Chicken” respectively these items make the traditional customers of these establishment’s scratch their heads and the health professionals among them faint.
Major players in the casual dining space across America are operating a parallel strategy: Launch new digital brands operated via ghost kitchens that appropriate their existing ingredients into indulgent hangover food items. These menus focus on only a few such items, for instance Outback Steakhouse’s “Tender Shack” has effectively two choices: “Dang Good” fried tenders and “Nashville Hot AF Tenders” that can be ordered as a combo, on their own, or in sandwich form. Further, the items that are offered bolster names that sound as though some middle manager was tasked with producin titles that are “trendy” and “young”. They’re loud, they’re aggressive, and yes they’re a bit out of touch, but these restaurants are all clearly trying here. Trying to make their brands accessible and enticing to a new audience.
Restaurants like IHOP and TGI Friday’s feel worn out and old, which is ok if you’re forty and it's a wednesday morning but not if you’re twenty three and you have a hundred different alternatives. Disconnected from the younger generation, these brands are looking for an in by any means. Look no further for evidence of this than the partnership between IHOP and Noah Schnapp - the Netflix Stranger Things teenage actor. Facilitated by Nextbite, the delivery-only food brand launching service, IHOP fulfills orders for Schnapp’s new “restaurant” TenderFix. If you remove the logo, TenderFix and Tender Shack could be the same restaurant. TenderFix serves two fried chicken sandwiches, with side options as follows: waffle fries, chocolate chip cookie, brownie. That’s it. That’s the entire menu. They didn’t even try. Why aren’t they called “Walloping Waffle Fries” or something like that?
This is about as clear of a branding play as you could imagine. Schnapp slaps his name on some chicken, IHOP makes that chicken, and Schnapp’s fans eat that chicken. That’s the gist of it. Now Nextbite deserves an article of its own, but there are two things important to note here. The first is the strategy description on its website: Data mining, trends, psychographic analysis. Basically, Nextbite is doing the same thing TikTok does to get you to keep watching videos. The company is finding the simplest dopamine rush possible to get people to buy food - in this case it's glutinous chicken sandwiches. The second is that Nextbite also runs IHOP’s “Super Megga Dilla”. Yeah, the Pizza Quesadilla place.
As their existing audience ages out, the evolution of these brands depends on catering to Gen-Z. Will this be entirely through virtual brands? And will these virtual brands wholly dependent on branding be able to hold weight in the next decade?