Director, Brand Experience (IHOP)

Based in Pasadena, California, Dine Brands Global, Inc. (NYSE: DIN), through its subsidiaries, franchises restaurants under Applebee's Neighborhood Grill + Bar®, IHOP® and Fuzzy's Taco Shop® brands. With over 3,500 restaurants combined in 18 countries and 354 franchisees as of December 31, 2023, Dine Brands is one of the largest full-service restaurant companies in the world. For more information on Dine Brands, visit the Company's website located at www.dinebrands.com.

The Role:

Reporting to the Executive Director, Brand Experience, the Director will be a strategic and creative integrated marketing leader responsible for bringing the IHOP brand and products to life with innovative, holistic (fully end-to-end) campaigns, programs, and activations that will build affinity, engagement, and loyalty among current and future audiences.

The leader will strengthen and grow the IHOP brand in the US through a combination of differentiated brand strategy, bold creative, and fully integrated campaigns, programs, and brand experiences.

This is not a traditional integrated marketing role – it will require strategic brainpower, boundless creativity, ingenuity, US cultural know-how, thinking beyond boundaries, and pushing for integration between many diverse activities for scaled impact.  It is an opportunity to reimagine the go-to-market playbook for a beloved brand, translating the upside into category growth.

Key Responsibilities:

You will be responsible for helping deliver a brand activation pipeline with creative swings that will drive traffic and cultural top-spin for IHOP.

• Brand Moments:
  • Deliver relevant and impactful brand cultural moments to drive top of mind awareness for IHOP and reinvigorate brand love.
  • Lead ideation sessions with internal and agency stakeholders to identify potential brand experiences.
  • Evaluate possible activations to identify opportunities that are most likely to successfully achieve strategic objectives. Manage execution of successful brand experiences
• Integrated Go-to-Market Planning & Execution:
  • Build annual and quarterly integrated go-to-market plans based on product marketing strategies and product launch roadmap across owned channels, paid, and earned.
  • Oversee Local Store Marketing team to deliver nationally consistent, locally activated marketing plans and access to approved creative and templates to efficiently support cohesive local marketing initiatives
  • Partner with Brand Calendar Team to develop creative briefs outlining calendar initiatives, insights, messaging and channel strategies to ensure a united understanding for our internal and agency partners and seamless creative execution across all touchpoints
• Brand Strategy:
  • Translate key business and marketing objectives into a clear, actionable communication strategy (audiences, message, creative, channels).
  • Define and activate IHOP’s unique role and place in culture with clear programming, campaigns, and moments.

• Team Leadership:
  • Build and maintain 4 key internal teams including advertising, culture, local restaurant marketing, and partnerships.
  • Cultivate an inclusive, collaborative, and equitable team culture that promotes ideation and innovation, risk taking, ownership, and accountability.
  • Build and maintain a healthy environment through coaching, mentorship, regular performance reviews, and feedback.

• Agency Management:
  • Day to day lead of Integrated Agency Team comprised of internal creative team, SOW creative agencies, PR, and media.
  • Execute briefings, manage agency relationships with potential SOW creative agencies, prioritize IAT resources, lead SOW allocations and track NAF budget reconciliation
  • Review brand creative to ensure assets deliver on the brief and execute a cohesive GTM strategy. Ensure creative for all owned initiatives are reviewed by relevant parties, such as Product, Ops & Legal 
  • Continue to identify the right in-house vs. external agency partner model and resourcing. 
• Reporting and Measurement:
  • Deliver regular integrated marketing updates to senior business leadership.  Partner with business insights, media, communications, social, consumer insights, and product marketing to deliver integrated marketing insights, performance metrics, learnings, and strategic implications.

Skills & Requirements:

• Minimum 10+ years of integrated marketing experience (preferably across diverse areas) and on multiple brands.
• 10+ years of experience with team leadership and cross-functional leadership.
• Proven track record of building and rolling out brand strategies and best-in-class integrated marketing initiatives and transformed brands and grew businesses into positions of market leadership.
• Experience leveraging strategic brand marketing and integrated go-to-market strategies to shift from product-based to experience-based marketing.
• Expertise in executing large-scale, multi-channel integrated marketing campaigns (online, offline, advertising, digital, experiential, partnerships), including experience with both brand building and acquisition marketing initiatives.
• Experience leading agency partners, production partners, collaborating with in-house creative team, and other brands to deliver fully integrated marketing plans and initiatives.
• Ability to operate in a fast-paced environment, demonstrating agility and adaptability to quickly respond to consumer, market, and cultural opportunities.
• High emotional intelligence, enabling close working relationships with key leaders and solving complex problems at scale and speed.
• Base salary $165k- $185k depending on experience

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

Dine Brands Global strongly supports equal employment opportunity for all applicants regardless of race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, pregnancy, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, marital status, veteran status, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, sexual orientation, genetic information, or any other status protected by federal, state, or local law. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act and/or other applicable laws and regulations in other jurisdictions.

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