Three years in the past, a self-described “satire fangirl” in Los Angeles posted two images aspect by aspect on Twitter. The primary was a shot of Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine in live performance, exhibiting off his sinewy torso lined in tattoos. The opposite photograph was a brown paper takeout bag from Chipotle.
“Adam Levine seems like a Chipotle bag and I can’t cease fascinated with it,” she wrote.
It was a typical social-media joke: intelligent, moderately correct, and humorous. For about three seconds. Which may have been the top of it, too, besides that the publish caught the eye of Chipotle’s social-media crew.
And it wasn’t the primary time. In 2019, after Maroon 5 wrapped up its set within the Tremendous Bowl halftime present, others had made the identical comparability between the rock vocalist’s monochromatic tats and the informal Mexican chain’s well-known luggage, filled with line drawings and numerous ruminations scrawled in undulating textual content.
Although it might take a number of years to show the meme right into a tangible piece of promoting, this week, Chipotle execs are feeling good about having performed it.
At present, some two weeks after the June 13 “Tatted Like a Chipotle Bag” marketing campaign, the chain’s social chief Kirby Ann Connell stated that the promotion notched its highest single-day gross sales quantity in years. This, along with producing 102 million social impressions and, by the corporate’s depend, 9.2 billion “PR impressions” total. (Chipotle didn’t disclose particular greenback figures.)
Ever since these first tweets about Levine’s inked abs and pecs in 2019, “we’ve constantly seen followers on social media reference being ‘tatted up like a Chipotle bag,’” Connell advised ADWEEK. “Whereas we’ve realized into the joke, we’ve been ready for the proper thought to highlight [it.]”
That chance arrived when Connell’s crew famous the strategy of June’s Friday the thirteenth, a holy day for tattoo aficionados since 2008. That’s when Dallas’ Elm Road Tattoo inked individuals with the quantity 13 at no cost (415 individuals took benefit of the supply), and parlors across the nation adopted go well with.
However whereas Connell’s crew struck on day for the promo, it nonetheless confronted a logistical downside. Whereas almost a 3rd of People have not less than one tattoo, based on Pew analysis knowledge, it appeared like a little bit of a stretch to ask abnormal customers—even hard-core beef barbacoa followers—to get a needle beneath their pores and skin for the larger glorification of a model. (Although it has been recognized to occur.)
So the corporate selected a softer strategy. Anybody with any present tattoo they have been prepared to point out—and who lined up at one in every of 13 designated areas between 3:00 and 4:00 p.m. native time—would qualify for a buy-one-get-one supply on an entree of their selecting. For these with virgin pores and skin, Chipotle supplied non permanent tattoos whose unabashedly swellheaded designs included “Chipotle is my life.”
A key process for Connell’s crew through the two months it took to place the promotion collectively was selecting out the 13 taking part areas from the three,726 whole within the U.S.
“We chosen eating places in cities which can be thought-about to be essentially the most tatted in America, together with precedence markets for Chipotle,” Connell stated. Among the many cities on that listing have been Austin, San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, and Miami—which, with 24 tattoo parlors for each 100,000 residents—is America’s main tat city.
And it labored. “Chipotle achieved its highest-ever gross sales throughout a non-peak hour, with strains out the doorways,” Connell stated.
However the purpose it labored appears to have much less to do with literal tattooing than with utilizing tattoos as a type of Gen-Z FOMO engine.
Not solely had the concept for the promo come from younger followers to begin with, however the giveaway additionally “rewarded” them for his or her “distinctive self-expression,” Connell stated, by making a participatory occasion that was extra about diners than what they have been eating on. Unit managers have been prepared to stretch the definition of tatted to incorporate one younger man who taped a Chipotle bag to his arm and the girl who scrawled CHIPOTLE on hers utilizing a ballpoint pen.
There was, nonetheless, not less than one documented case of somebody getting an actual tattoo only for the sake of a lunch giveaway.
“Free Chipotle was all I heard,” he defined.
