What is it?
We live in a society that basically follows a ‘if it is not on social media, it does not exist’ model. The company Chipotle knows this, as a result, they have taken advantage of it. While this food chain is not new (in fact it was founded in 1993), they have learnt how to take advantage of the digital era, and integrate digital marketing to their day a day processes.
In May 2019, when famous app TikTok first took off, a worker of the company made a video of himself flipping over a lid of one of their products and the video became a sensation, so popular they decided to challenge their customers to create a video doing it and upload it on TikTok. The challenge reached 268M of viewers in one month. From then on, they have invested a lot of money on TikTok and periodically they launch new challenges like #lidflipchallenge #guacdance (in honor of avocado day) #boorito challenge (for halloween) and many others. And for those TikTok users who follow them and also upload the challenge, they offer a food retribution.
Why it’s Cool?
- It is an affordable way of digital marketing and since they use a very popular app among millenials and younger generations, they can reach a wide spectrum of customers.
- Chipotle announced digital sales growth of 88% and revenue growth of 14.6% to $1.4bn since the challenges started.
- It is indirect marketing. People do it for fun or to get some food compensation, that cost little to the company, but at the same time they are advertising their business.
- They have reached more than 382.2K followers on TikTok.
Why it has future growth potential?
While trends change rapidly, we know that the only thing that isn’t going away is technology and digital communications. Creating strong links on social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, would increase the brand popularity and reach out to younger and mid age sectors. The way that they are promoting their restaurant, using indirect digital marketing, has increased their sales in a matter of months without having to run big campaigns, and although this kind of popularity comes and goes, well managed, it can result in extreme success for businesses.
