Blog 7: Chipotle Mexican Grill

The company chosen for this blog is Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc. It is a restaurant chain in the U.S., which prepares specialty Mexican dishes such as salads, burritos and tacos. In addition to its home market, the company also enjoys significant customer footfall in its restaurants located in the U.K., France, Germany and Canada. It operates a total of 1,595 outlets in these countries. It was founded in 1993 in Denver, Colorado. It earned total revenues of $3.2 billion and profits of $327 million in the financial year 2012-13 (Annual Report, 2013; Chipotle.com, n.d.). The company was ranked 20^th in its list of most innovative organizations by Forbes magazine in 2014 (Forbes, 2014). The restaurant is a popular choice among different segments of customers due to its varied menu and fast service.

 

 

The particular case of ‘misuse’ of social technology by Chipotle that is being considered here is a fake “hacking” of its tweet handle in 2013, later acknowledged to have been orchestrated by the company executives themselves. Immediately prior to this event Chipotle had launched a 20 day treasure hunt campaign, called “Adventurito”, at some of their restaurants. In order to garner more publicity for the campaign, management thought that they would post related tweets from their tweeter account (having 200,000 followers at that time) that would show the account as having been purportedly hacked.

 

These tweets, which were in the nature of treasure hunt directions and responses, were posted on 21^st July, 2013 (the 20^th anniversary of Chipostle), and were retweeted 12,000 times. The account added 4,000 followers in a day, compared to an average addition of 250 followers on a normal day. Many other tweeter users immediately suspected something wrong – a number of users questioned whether the account was indeed hacked or whether it was merely a corporate attempt at manufacturing attention on social media (Huffington Post, 2013). Later the Director of Communications at Chipotle, Chris Arnold, admitted that it was a preplanned campaign and a fake “hack”.

 

In terms of marketing and publicity, the event was neither a success nor a failure. Although the company managed to add several thousand more twitter follower, its Facebook account neither gained nor lost many users as a result of it. While there were a few angry user comments, a majority of social media users ignored the event. However, there were many comments from online commenters and journalists that it was wrong for Chipostle to have launched such a campaign (Tobin, 2013).

The incident can be prevented in future by the company defining a clear social media policy as well as its marketing goal. Chipotle positions itself as a restaurant that sells “food with integrity” and one that stresses on transparency and clarity in its customer relations. Since branding on social media platforms is a long term process, just as branding in traditional media, the company should understand that it risks losing customer confidence through such staged “hacking” of its own marketing channel. This would ultimately be viewed by customers as an unethical activity, and they would as a result lose trust in the company (Wilms, 2013). Following the eight ethical principles outlined by Simon Rogerson, it appears that the action was neither honest nor fair – it violated the trust of unsuspecting twitter followers (Brinkman & Sanders, 2012). Since the incident did not add substantially to Chipotle’s social media followers, it should realize that all publicity is certainly not good publicity and therefore should refrain from such campaigns in the future. 

 References

Annual Report. (2013). Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc. Available at http://ir.chipotle.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=194775&p=irol-reportsAnnual

Brinkman, W. & Sanders, A. (2012). Ethics in a Computing Culture. Retrieved from http://www.cengagebrain.co.nz/content/9781133990932.pdf

Forbes. (2014). World’s Most Innovative Companies. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/companies/chipotle-mexican-grill/

Huffington Post. (2014). Chipotle Faked Its Recent Twitter Hack, Confirms Company. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/25/chipotle-faked-twitter-hack_n_3652534.html

Tobin, A. (2013). Social Justice: Chipotle’s Pathetic Misuse of Social Media. ARCompany. Retrieved from http://arcompany.co/social-justice-chipotles-pathetic-misuse-of-social-media/

Wilms, T. (2013). The Fake Corporate Twitter Hack #Fail. Forbes. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2013/07/26/the-fake-corporate-twitter-hack-fail/