Chipotle Went Back to Basics for National Burrito Day — And it Worked
Back when I was in college we had a saying: how do you get people to show up to your event? Free food.
It really is that simple. As a brand, Chipotle has been fearless in its digital marketing. It was one of the earliest brands to run a campaign on the young social media platform Threads (Instagram’s Twitter replacement) for National Avocado Day. It has been aggressively pursuing Gen Z in the hopes of attracting younger workers with authentic-feeling videos of Chipotle employees that describe what it’s like to work there. But for their most recent campaign for National Burrito Day, the brand went back to basics, and offered free burritos.
Taking to Twitter, because back on April 6 — National Burrito Day — it was still Twitter, Chipotle dispersed text-to-win codes, giving away 10,000 free burritos, a surprise additional 500 codes, and free delivery on $10 orders. And Twitter went wild.
Chipotle also did what it does best, which is finding ways to have campaigns span multiple platforms. For this one, the day before National Burrito Day, the brand partnered with GrubHub, offering 20,000 free burritos to consumers who placed a minimum $20 order on the app. They had Alix Earle, the top ranked influencer among teens, promote the deal on TikTok, and well, the rest was history. All free burritos were claimed through the food delivery app within 12 hours.
It’s important to recognize what Chipotle has done for this big annual holiday of theirs in the past. They’ve spent years, each time trying to come up with the next big thing, jumping on trends like cryptocurrency and the metaverse, or promising a Chipotle Burrito Builder experience via Roblox. It’s good to be creative like this, to try to come up with out of the box ideas, to be early to using new social platforms. It’s a smart marketing strategy, truly. But sometimes a brand has to stop and ask themselves, what do their customers really want? When it comes to Chipotle, they want free burritos! Duh!
You can come up with all the glitzy ads and campaigns you want, nothing is ever going to compare to that. The result was Chipotle’s second largest digital sales day of all time, and its highest one-day engagement on social media ever. Is that enough, though? Does this actually benefit the brand long term, or was it just a lot of free burritos? Chipotle says yes, with CEO Brian Niccol previously pointing to free giveaways and rewards programs massively boosting the loyalty of their customers.
It is interesting that the brand chose Twitter, of all social medias, to launch their campaign. Even back in April, the platform was already massively on the rocks and experiencing a pullback in advertising. Chipotle, however, claims that they simply chose Twitter because it was logistically the best suited for live text-code drops, noting that despite their strong presence on TikTok, that platform isn’t as set up for real-time engagement.
Clearly, it worked, proving that despite Twitter’s issues, the platform could still be enormously helpful to brands. The question is, would that still be true today? Incredibly the platform has changed so much even since last spring. Would this campaign work as well on X? If the brand were running the campaign today, would it be run on Threads, like its National Avocado Day campaign was in July? We’ll just have to keep an eye on campaigns like these to find out.
In the meantime, the campaign itself is an excellent lesson in being in tune with your customers. Campaigns that push the envelope are great, necessary even, but we have to be careful to not get too far away from the point. The point is to get people to eat, and continue eating, at Chipotle. And what’s a fail-proof way of bringing customers in the — both literal and virtual — door? That’s right. Free food.
