Social Media Case Study Chipotle's

5. Conduct an analysis of the company’s sales efforts, especially regarding the cultivation of customer relationships.

Even though Chipotle operates in the fast-food industry that can only provide limited services, the company wants to change people’s way of thinking about fast foods and makes the order served fast but without having the “Fast food” experience. Chipotle in recent years puts a huge emphasis on educating the customers about locally produced food, naturally raised animal meat, and sustainable farming. Aligning with the core mission of “Food with integrity”, Chipotle has launched a series of marketing campaign, including advertising, websites, free promotions and theme activities.

While other fast food

companies spent millions on traditional national campaigns, Chipotle was thinking to channel more lively and engaging content in their advertisements. The first television commercial of Chipotle was presented on the Grammy. It was a 2 minute animated story about a farmer who finally convinced by his conscience after his business grow to a industry plant and decides go back to a sustainable and humane farm. During our group’s visiting to the local Chipotle store, I also saw a lot of posters about the Chipotle’s ingredients. For example, there was one mentioned that Chipotle offered not only a burrito, but its good service, local-sourced foods and the cultivation efforts on food culture. Although I did not eat Chipotle that often, those posters drive my attention on the freshness of the food intentionally. Also, instead of selling packaging to advertisers, Chipotle used their packaging to entertain their customers by launching the “Cultivating Thought” author series on the cups and bags. The series contained thought-provoking essays written by influential authors, actors and comedians. By doing so, the customer of Chipotle can have a break from their busy days, and enjoy a two minutes thoughtful reading that vary in topics, perspectives and focuses.

Besides the creative advertisements, Chipotle also offers variety types of online and offline promotions that continuing educating people about food. Recently, Chipotle launched “Friend or Faux”, which is an online game that allowed customers to learn the difference between Chipotle’s ingredients and other fast food’s ingredients. This integrated marketing campaign creates interactive digital experience for customers by asking the player to decide whether some ingredients are included in Chipotle’s food or the food from others. With the high involvement games, Chipotle makes it clear to customers that where the food is from and how it is prepared.

Chipotle hosted various types of activities that promote discounted or free burritos. For example, Chipotle offered free dinners for two and burritos for the best related to Haiku on the Facebook. Also, customers who dressed in costume on Halloween can score a burrito for $3 only. Furthermore, Chipotle hosted yearly “Chipotle Cultivate Music Festival” in Chicago, which is an integration of free food, musicians, star chefs and local farmers. Customer can have a chance to not only enjoy the new sample dishes of Chipotle, live music show, cooking demonstrations and sustainable farming classes.

6. Provide a description of the company’s promotional efforts aligned with one‐to‐one marketing and socially‐networked marketing. This section should tie directly with the company’s CRM efforts.

Tapping into the social media can help Chipotle distinguish itself from the highly competitive fast casual industry.

Chipotle channeled a one-on-one engagement model for social media platforms. Chipotle formed a three-person team that entirely devoted to post and respond on the official social media accounts like Twitter and Facebook. Each team member would sign their own names at the end of each post, and they can also repost or respond to the comments in a personal manner. Customers are treated as individuals, and they would receive messages based on their own situations, such as “How’s school going?” and “Where do you go during the winter break”. This strategy allowed Chipotle to know and interact with the customer in particular, providing a unique customer experience for every customer. Chipotle loves to communicate with customers, 90% of the company’s activities are responding to customers through @-mention on Twitter (klamn, 2012). While other companies spent millions on traditional advertising, Chipotle puts small budgets in branding through social media. With 2 million followers, the company responded 95.28% of Facebook posts with an average responding time of 65 minutes, which was much more efficient than other fast food restaurants. (Ciotti,

2014).