Three years in the past, a self-described “satire fangirl” in Los Angeles posted two photographs facet by facet on Twitter. The primary was a shot of Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine in live performance, exhibiting off his sinewy torso coated in tattoos. The opposite photograph was a brown paper takeout bag from Chipotle.
“Adam Levine seems to be 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. That may have been the top of it, too, besides that the submit caught the eye of Chipotle’s social-media group.
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 baggage, filled with line drawings and varied ruminations scrawled in undulating textual content.
Although it could 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 achieved it.
Immediately, 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 rely, 9.2 billion “PR impressions” general. (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 instructed ADWEEK. “Whereas we’ve discovered into the joke, we’ve been ready for the fitting thought to highlight [it.]”
That chance arrived when Connell’s group famous the strategy of June’s Friday the thirteenth, a holy day for tattoo aficionados since 2008. That’s when Dallas’ Elm Avenue Tattoo inked folks with the quantity 13 totally free (415 folks took benefit of the provide), and parlors across the nation adopted swimsuit.
However whereas Connell’s group struck on a superb day for the promo, it nonetheless confronted a logistical downside. Whereas practically a 3rd of People have no less than one tattoo, in accordance with Pew analysis knowledge, it appeared like a little bit of a stretch to ask abnormal shoppers—even hard-core beef barbacoa followers—to get a needle underneath their pores and skin for the higher glorification of a model. (Although it has been recognized to occur.)
So the corporate selected a softer strategy. Anybody with any present tattoo they had been prepared to indicate—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 provide on an entree of their selecting. For these with virgin pores and skin, Chipotle supplied momentary tattoos whose unabashedly swellheaded designs included “Chipotle is my life.”
A key process for Connell’s group in the course of the two months it took to place the promotion collectively was choosing out the 13 taking part areas from the three,726 complete within the U.S.
“We chosen eating places in cities which are thought-about to be essentially the most tatted in America, together with precedence markets for Chipotle,” Connell stated. Among the many cities on that record had 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 traces 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 form of Gen-Z FOMO engine.
Not solely had the concept for the promo come from younger followers to start out 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 had been eating on. Unit managers had been prepared to stretch the definition of tatted to incorporate one younger man who taped a Chipotle bag to his arm and the lady who scrawled CHIPOTLE on hers utilizing a ballpoint pen.
There was, nonetheless, no 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.
