Burritos, Carnitas, Guac - these are the associations that come into mind when I think of Chipotle. Many fast food restaurants claim to use sustainable farming practices while the reality is that many restaurants are focused on low-cost models which lead to unethical and unsettling practices in huge farming factories. In 2012, Chipotle released an animated film titled "Back to the Start," where a family farmer switched first to factory farming and then switched back to having animals out to pasture. The film was shown online, in movie theaters, and then was aired on the 2012 Grammy Awards as a national commercial.
Target: Consumers of Chipotle, People who are moving towards sustainable living (a trend that has gained popularity within the past couple of years)
Insight: A lot of the fast food industries provide fast food at cheap prices by lower costs in the quality. It is easy for many companies to profit largely from a low cost structure. Many farmers get sucked into the industrialized world that the world has become. However, with an increase in awareness of sustainability, many farmers and companies have slowly switched back to natural farming.
Brand Idea/Positioning: "Cultivate a Better World" - Chipotle shows its movement towards natural and family farming rather than industrial. They want to provide their customers with the very best products.
Objectives: Inform consumers to think about sustainability, the places they choose to eat, and to spread awareness about their switch to natural farming.
Strengths: Not only did Chipotle establish itself as a more sustainable fast food brand, but it also helped to promote a social cause that it truly cared about. After the commercial aired online at the Grammy's, viewers were urged to download the Willie Nelson rendition of "The Scientist", which played in the background of the ad. The proceeds from those downloads went towards the Chipotle Cultivate Foundation which encourages sustainable farming methods and family farming. This ad helped the company further promote it's stance on sustainable food and farm to table products which is rare in the fast food industry. Furthermore, prior to this ad, Chipotle did not do TV advertising.
Weaknesses: Sometimes, I question the integrity of many fast food chains as many of them are still unreliable. Chipotle recently had the ecoli scare which caused them to close down their stores nationwide. Many might be critical of this ad because it doesn't prove to the viewer that they did anything to change their farming practices. As an advertisement, I think that it overall did a great job achieving its objectives. One thing that I would've liked to see is more advertising for Chipotle itself if it were being geared to being an advertisement rather than just a information video.
I think that this ad changed the way people view fast food. Chipotle began moving away from factory farm suppliers 10 years ago. Their brand association is "Food with Integrity" which is something that this video showed when the farmer chose to switch back to natural farming by breaking down the buildings and houses he built for his animals.
The year after it was released, it had over four million YouTube views and was shown on 10,000 theater screens nationwide. It was also ranked in the top 21 ad campaigns of the 21st century by Ad Age. Want to see if the ad was really that influential? Take a look at it below and decide for yourself.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/business/media/chipotle-ad-promotes-sustainable-farming.html