Applebee's Marketing Reset: Burgers, Buckets and a New Agency

One year into her tenure as Applebee's CMO, Michelle Chin has already replaced the brand's creative agency of record, staffing BBDO Chicago after nearly a decade with Grey, and her social-first push is producing measurable traffic gains among Gen Z customers.

Her first year wasn't spent in a boardroom. Chin visited restaurants, met franchisees, and watched how employees worked their regulars. Some guests had favorite seats. Others called ahead to check whether a particular server was on shift. A few employees, she noticed, considered themselves the mayor of the neighborhood.

Those relationships became the foundation for her marketing thesis. Applebee's has spent decades building its identity as a neighborhood gathering place, and Chin found the promise still alive inside the restaurants — even as younger consumers drifted toward competitors or simply had little familiarity with the brand.

What does this change for the menu?

Chin's culinary strategy starts with categories customers already attach to Applebee's: appetizers and burgers. The play is menu engineering, not reinvention — making familiar products interesting enough to trigger another visit.

The burger pipeline shows the method. A grilled cheese cheeseburger proved appetite for mashups. The follow-up O-M-Cheeseburger added an attention-getting cheese pull. Then Applebee's crossed burgers with an established item, Chicken Wonton Tacos, to build Cheeseburger Wonton Tacos for summer.

"Those are things that we're doing to talk to a different generation, link to categories that we own, link to adjacent categories that we could expand in and give people that taste profile that they love," Chin said.

The same logic governs beverages, where the vessel is part of the product. After years of serving drinks in buckets, Chin challenged her team to make the container more distinctive. The result: the Don Julio Poolio, served in a bright blue inflatable pool.

That drink also carries pricing weight. It gives Applebee's a higher-priced beverage to sell alongside its All You Can Eat promotion — what Chin calls a barbell strategy, opening room for a premium purchase inside a value-driven visit. The brand also paired All You Can Eat with the Dollarita, letting younger legal-drinking-age guests experience a promotion they may have known only by reputation.

The fourth-quarter menu leans on another owned asset: Sizzlin' Skillets, in cheesy chicken, shrimp chicken scampi and garlic sirloin versions. Chin counts Skillets as "distinctively us," with sensory appeal built for colder weather — the sound and sight of a hot skillet crossing the dining room working as marketing before the first bite.

Who's behind the shift?

Beyond the BBDO Chicago appointment, Chin has added new vice presidents of integrated marketing and culinary, roles she views as the connective tissue between brand messaging and what guests actually find when they sit down. A social team that joined shortly before her arrival has helped Applebee's identify conversations it can join without pitching product.

"When we do jump into the conversation and be part of their everyday conversation, the brand's showing up authentically," Chin said. "We're not trying to hard sell anything."

The occasions she wants to own are deliberately small: a stop before a game, wings after a movie, a meal following Sunday services. None requires a birthday or a holiday.

"I think we've put this whole notion of dining out on a pedestal and it makes it hard and kind of like out of touch with it," Chin said. "And so make it casual again. Like I just want to connect. I just want to see you. Let's just grab some wings."

Looking toward 2027, Chin wants test learnings wired directly into the neighborhood positioning, with reasons to visit that work across boomers, Gen X, millennials and Gen Z alike. Future marketing, she said, will lean on "far more emotional storytelling, but done in a way where it's actionable and relevant through the lens of the guests more so than through the lens of the brand."