During Wingstop’s first quarter earnings call Wednesday, CEO Michael Skipworth painted a detailed picture of the chain’s recent growth, including the addition of over 1,000 new restaurants since 2023, as well as the more than doubling of systemwide sales during that period.
Wingstop finished 2025 with $4.9 billion in domestic sales, marking an 11% year-over-year increase, and just under 2,600 units, according to new data from Technomic.
This growth provides an important backdrop to Wingstop’s broader marketing story. A bigger system creates more ad funds, of course, while a robust unit count goal of 10,000 locations globally creates the need for more brand awareness. In marketing speak, this is called a flywheel. For Wingstop, the inflection point of its marketing investments came in 2024 when the chain meaningfully ramped up its national TV advertising and increased its national advertising fund to about 5.3% of systemwide sales.
This aggressive approach continued throughout 2024 and 2025 and included partnerships with the NFL, NBA, UFC, WWE, WNBA star Paige Bueckers and more. In July 2025, Skipworth said these partnerships were allowing the brand to lean into culture where it makes sense, and added that the playbook is working.
By the fall of 2025, Wingstop had an entirely new ad campaign, called Wingstop is Here. The objective is to reach a “core demand” cohort that includes groups of two or more adults who “prioritize a high-quality restaurant experience and access brands through off-premise occasions,” Skipworth told analysts in November. The guests, he added, are equally representative across ethnicities, age groups, and income levels.
“We are only winning roughly 2% of this demand space, and we believe we have a runway to gain our fair share at 20% over the long term,” he said. “Our gap in awareness to larger, more mature national brands is more than 20%. As consumers become aware of the brand, consideration becomes an unlock.”
Wingstop calls this strategy of bringing in new guests “filling the top of the funnel.”
In more recent quarters, Wingstop has complemented this “top of the funnel” strategy with personalization, leveraging the 60 million consumers in its digital database to provide more visibility and insights into what they want. That data has shown that Gen Z consumers are one of the highest growth cohorts, while the Wingstop is Here ad campaign has also begun attracting more Gen X consumers and higher-income consumers.
“Our campaign is designed to expand the top of the funnel, and we are beginning to see early signs that it is working,” Skipworth told analysts this week. “New guests are increasingly skewing towards higher income cohorts, particularly in the $50,000 to $100,000 range, one of the fastest-growing segments among new guests we're acquiring. This gives us confidence that our marketing is resonating with a broader audience and is reflective of the opportunity we're targeting in our demand space. We feel like our marketing is resonating. We're seeing reactivation of laps. We're seeing improvements in awareness and conversion — all really strong signals that it's resonating.”
The company expects this momentum to continue as it enters the next phase of the campaign, which will showcase the “quality and premium experience” of the brand and highlight new menu innovations, he added. The next phase also includes the upcoming national launch of the Club Wingstop loyalty program. Skipworth said it is not a traditional, discount-driven program, but rather created to provide Wingstop’s most loyal guests with access, experiences and benefits that go beyond points and deals.
“What differentiates the platform is how it enhances the guest interaction through capabilities like group ordering, point sharing and personalized offers that adapt based on behavior,” he said.
The launch, expected to come at the end of the second quarter, will be supported by a 360-degree marketing strategy, including personalization, merchandise and experiential features. Combined, the ad campaign and the loyalty program illustrate how Wingstop’s marketing strategy has evolved during the chain’s recent period of high growth.
“If you go back four (or) five years, we were able to be more of a marketing strategy that was almost a one-size-fits-all. As we look at how our business has grown and scaled and diversified, we are 100% aligned with (continued evolution), and that is we have to be very targeted,” Skipworth said. “Messages need to be different based on audience, based on channel, and that can go from linear TV all the way down to social platforms. That’s the playbook we're executing — making sure our message is tailored specifically to the target audience that we're trying to reach. You’re going to see more variation in the messages we’re putting in front of consumers. You’ll see more of that come to life as we talked about the next chapter of Wingstop is Here.”
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