CHIPOTLE
For exploding all the rules of fast food
Mark Crumpacker stared at the job description with disbelief. “A headhunter looking to fill a CMO position for another major fast-food brand got in touch with me,” says Chipotle’s chief marketing officer. “The description was really bizarre. The head marketing person runs the culinary team and is responsible for the whole menu!” Crumpacker doesn’t play that game at Chipotle, choosing instead a fast-food heresy: Tell customers what’s really inside its burritos. “Typically, fast-food marketing is a game of trying to obscure the truth,” he says. “The more people know about most fast-food companies, the less likely they’d want to be a customer.” “Today, even with 30,000 employees, the crew will come in the morning and see all this fresh produce and meats they have to marinate, rice they have to cook, and fresh herbs they have to chop,” says Ells. “There have been many opportunities over the years to take that all away and introduce highly processed
foods, but we’ve done just the opposite.” Now opening a new restaurant almost every other day, Chipotle’s sustainable-food approach may have an industry-wide effect. Chipotle is undertaking ambitious projects such as working with farmers to breed almost-lost heritage chickens that can roam on pastures instead of being confined to crates. In Chipotle’s version of the food-marketing chain, this focus leaves fewer dollars for aggressive, traditional advertising. Crumpacker turned to CAA Marketing, the arm of the Hollywood talent agency plugged in to the best storytellers in the world. Crumpacker told CAA he had seen a heart-tugging two-and-a-halfminute commercial for Chevron called “Human Energy.” He wanted a Chipotle version. “If a company like that can make you cry, imagine if we had something comparable for Chipotle,” Crumpacker says. His idea was to tell the animated story of a hog farmer who creates an industrialized, efficient farm but one day realizes
it’s not the right thing to do; he tears down his farm as an act of conscience and reverts to raising hogs on open pastures. Willie Nelson recorded a haunting cover of Coldplay’s “The Scientist” for a nominal fee. Before running the video on 10,000 movie screens, Crumpacker’s team released it on YouTube and it went viral, receiving more than 2 million views. Nelson’s “The Scientist” is now the first song out of Chipotle’s emerging music label, whose funds go to the Chipotle Cultivate Foundation, which will support family farms. Last October, for Chipotle’s second music video, Crumpacker got Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman Karen O to cover Willie Nelson’s “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” In other words, instead of a goofy king or a catchy slogan, Chipotle is developing a recognizable marketing campaign around the idea that our food production should be healthier and more ethical. Instead of sponsoring a typical concert, last fall Chipotle staged a 17,000-person festival in Chicago called Cultivate. It paired chefs such as Amanda Freitag and Jonathan Waxman with local farmers for cooking demos, while CAA helped line up bands like Calexico to headline. As festival-goers roamed through the entertainment, they also discovered tents that informed them about shocking but common industrial-farming practices—e.g., female pigs being crammed into farrowing crates for months on end. Now Crumpacker says he is in talks with Jonathan Safran Foer, author of the noted pro-vegetarian manifesto Eating Animals, to develop stories that could appear on Chipotle’s packaging. “I think they’re open to try anything because they inherently want to change food culture,” says CAA Marketing agent Mark Shambura, of the brand’s bold collaborations. “They’re a huge billion-dollar company and they’re still able to be nimble and curious.” © 2012, Distributed by Tribune Media Services