Fluttering Carefully

Wow! talk about overdue. I won some Chipotle burritos this past March/April. I told the folks there (Greg and the ladies on that morning’s shift) that I would blog about it. I did not, until now. Ack!

It was great. I must have put about 30 business cards in their weekly winner box over a couple of months. That was a gratifying end. So here is some (not so) free advertising, to the tune of ≈24 burritos. Greg and Mario, the two fellas there that I am so acquainted with were not part of the staff that served up those burrittos and chips that morning, but they were still great, as you Chipotle frequenters should already know.

A little low-down on the Chipotle advertising budget: they don’t really have one. This is going to sound either novel, cheesy, or fake, but it seems to be sincere from what I learned there recently: they give out lots of free food each month, especially at promotional events, and they give lots of money to charity by way of promotional events (where they give all the proceeds on a given day to the humane society, farm-aid, etc.). All of that leads to press or word-of-mouth advertising. Pretty smart. There is another part to their marketing gimick: they make excellent food, they use quality ingredients, and they care about the people that they do business with (up and down the line) and you can see it when they buy organic and give their customers good quality, cleanly produced food. They just need to get rid of their blasphemous t-shirts and in-store posters that they sometimes use.