"Don't be Lame" with Chris Brandt, Chief Marketing Officer CMO Chipotle and Tania Yuki Shareablee

Thank you, happy to be here. And I have to, before I even jump into the questions, as a long-time vegan, thank you for the cauliflower rice and for adding in the sofritas. I was so excited when that happened.

It sure does. I'll tell you, it's one of the coolest things too, because everybody will tell you at Chipotle how much they love the brand, or what they did in college. It's great to walk around a conference with Chipotle on your badge because everybody has good stories and they really love the brand. We have a highly engaged group, and they also tell me how their college students love it and their high school age kids love it. So it's very fun to be a part of it. The downside is that everybody is also a marketer, so there's a lot of advice that comes along with the territory as well, but it's all fun too.

Well, that's amazing. Well, look, I mean, there's all the media, there's all the advertising, but that jumps into the first thing I want to discuss, which is you're also responsible for the experience of Chipotle. Particularly in the last year and a half that we've had, navigating what's happening in culture and figuring out how to be a part of that. Can you talk a little bit about what that's been like? I feel like you guys didn't skip a beat, but I'm sure there were moments where you sort of looked out at the world and just went...

We certainly have some legacy people, but a lot of this marketing group over the last three years really started in 2018. Our goal was really to make the brand more visible, more relevant, and more loved. We knew we could make the brand more visible by changing up our media plan and doing a lot of shifts there. But relevant and loved were more formidable goals. We wanted to be a part of driving culture. We had three main tenets: drive difference, drive purchase, and drive culture. The difference was our real food, our food with integrity, our real ingredients, and telling those stories. To honestly be a part of culture, we had to change a lot of things we were doing, release some of the shackles. We're really fortunate at Chipotle; we have a young consumer. Half of our consumers are Gen Z or Millennial, about twice the index in normal casual. Those people want to engage, and they want to engage on social media. So we set up a very different social media strategy than they had before, much less controlling, much more insight-driven. We got people who were really good at understanding Chipotle and how culture relates to Chipotle. We found out things like Chipotle is one of the first places young people go on a first date. They'll go down the line and say, 'Oh, it's white rice, chicken, blah blah blah.' If they say it's a chicken burrito, you know they're not really a consumer. We wanted to leverage all those things and be a part of what was going on, to be relevant to people in their 20s. People in their 20s define culture, whether it's in food, sport, or art. Everybody wants to be 20, whether you're 40 or 12. If we can stay relevant with them and at the forefront of what's cool, and figure out what things are cool that are relevant to our brand, we're going to find out how good we think we are.

The team did a great job. They figured out everybody's going to be on Zoom, so we had these Chipotle get-togethers beginning that Monday, March 15th or 16th. We had celebrities come in and people do things because we knew people were just going to be on Zoom for the first time. That was pretty cool. We had virtual things, a virtual prom. We used all of those tools. It was a credit to hiring a good team. The best thing you can do as a leader is get really good people, give them a framework and a direction, unshackle them, and let them go. One of the big things I place a premium on is people with ideas. Start small with something; if it works, we'll pour the gas to it. If it doesn't, we'll pivot away and do something else. It's not failure if you learn something. That team and our social team had a great sense of what the brand is about, the tone we wanted, and the things we don't want to do anymore. That 2018 and 2019 really set us up to leverage all the digital infrastructure we put in those years, which helped immensely in 2020. If the pandemic had happened to us in 2018 or 2019, it would have been a lot different story. We just didn't have the digital system ready. But when it did happen, we were as ready as anybody could be for a pandemic. We had laid a good foundation, so we were lucky in that sense.

Well, I think the good news is they like what it says about them and about Chipotle.

Wonderful you say that because our social strategy is to supercharge the super fans and let them. I don't ever want to pay an influencer to do something who's not a Chipotle consumer at heart already. The beauty of this brand is there are so many people, whether it's professional athletes or just regular people, who love the brand. It all feels very authentic and transparent because it is authentic and transparent. That's been a real hallmark for us. We want to find those super fans and let their voices be heard. The great thing is that when people inevitably have haters in that social world, they do a great job of saying things to the haters that we'd like to say but maybe can't, providing a positive counterbalance. I'm glad you said that because it shows our strategy is working.

Yeah, I think that again, they need to be authentic fans of the brand. We're not going to try to convince somebody who's not because it won't come across well and you'll get called out. Not all of our influencers happen to have a huge following. We're lucky that we've had some like Sean Mendes, who has 70 million followers. But we're happy to provide... We've been really active on TikTok, and I think TikTok will tell you Chipotle is one of the best brands on the platform because when we got on the platform, we really wanted to understand it and the right way to use it. Whether it's TikTok, Facebook, Snap, Instagram, or whatever, we want to make sure we understand the channel. One of our employees sent us this lid flip challenge where he could knock the bowl down and it flips the lid and puts it on top. We thought that was pretty cool, so we put it on Instagram and got a million views fast. We thought this could be the first challenge. This was back before brands were doing much on TikTok, and we did the lid flip challenge. I think we got 200 million views, and it just snowballed from there. We really want to understand those channels and have relevant advertising that makes sense in those channels. What you do on Snapchat is going to look different from other places. That's been a big part of how we do it. Not every influencer has to be huge; if they're really authentic and clever, let's pour the gas to them as well. Those tend to be a little more economical than some of the big people.

Let's talk about what you've done on TikTok. I know you've done some stuff around esports. I get a sense that you guys are almost always on the new platforms first. That's got to be hard. On one hand, you kind of throw it out as if it's the easiest thing ever, but can you talk a little bit about how you manage to always push big new concepts through?

Yeah, you know, we're not that big. We have a pretty small marketing team. The nice thing about Chipotle is we run all of our own restaurants. We own every single restaurant, so we don't have a lot of franchisees or a holding company to answer to. It's just us. Between me and my couple of VPs of marketing, we're the decision makers. I need to cover off the CEO on occasion, but by and large, people have let us run. It's very flat and quick, which enables us to be nimble. My number one rule of marketing is just to be nimble. When I started in 2018, I had two teenage boys, and all they were doing was playing Fortnite. It was single-handedly lowering the GPA of every kid that age. We thought, 'I want to be part of that passion.' We know our consumer is there, so how do we do it in the right way? We spent a lot of time understanding that culture. It was helpful for me because I played video games since I was a kid, but I needed to understand that culture is less like traditional competitive sports and more like freestyle skiing or skateboarding, where it's a collective. Just because I win doesn't mean you have to lose. It's still a business and an industry that's evolving. We didn't want to just go in and do autographs; that's not the way to do it. I always wanted to feel like an endemic sponsor, one who's parked. I learned this term back when I was at General Mills, talking with a magazine publisher. I asked how their business was, and they said it was good with the endemic sponsors but not so good otherwise. 'Endemic' means skis, boots, poles. I thought, 'I want my brand, if it's going to be in Ski Magazine, to feel like it's an endemic brand.' We wanted to feel like we're part of that community. The good news is we had a lot of esports guys and gals who were eating Chipotle and they liked the social benefit. We wanted to avoid any big mistakes, so we start small, pour the gas to what works, and keep building it every year. That's worked really well for us. The best compliment we get is when people say, 'Man, you guys have felt like you've been part of the industry for a long time.' That's a pretty fun place to be. The other part is, to your point about trying new platforms, we don't want to be lame, so we need to understand what that platform is and why we use it. We just did a search for more employees, and last week we were on Discord. I've never felt older than getting on Discord. It's really hard to navigate. But you know, sometimes it's better to try and be 80% of the way there than wait another six months and be 90% of the way there. You're never going to get to 100%. We have a culture where we want to try stuff. I want to hire people who are go-getters. One of the best pieces of advice I got about hiring was, 'You want to reign in the stallion, not beat the deck.' You want to hire those really go-getter folks, and that's who our consumer is by and large. They have ideas and want to go execute them, so let's give them some freedom to try different things. One of the beauties and curses of the retail world is you're only as good as last week. It doesn't matter what you did last year; it's like, 'How am I doing?' I'm always trying to improve. We try a lot of stuff. A lot of things work, some things don't, but that's okay.

Yeah, it's a balance. Marketing is a science now. There used to be that old adage that half my marketing money is wasted, I just don't know which half. That's really not true anymore. But I think you don't do things just because you can measure them, and just because you can measure them doesn't mean you shouldn't do them. There are some things that are really hard to measure that we are going to do because we think it's the right thing, like culture. But we are trying to triangulate and measure. One of the things Chipotle didn't have before I arrived was a whole marketing analytics function, so we built one. The rise of digital and putting things in digital, the beauty of that is you can test and learn on a really rapid basis. We're constantly optimizing our media mix, adjusting which creative gets more backing. But there are a lot of things we do, like our TV creative, where we're not spending a lot of time doing ad testing. We kind of figured out over time. We have tested some things almost just to figure out which ads are the best ones we have and learn from them so we can continue to optimize. There's an art and a science. Data is a tool; it is not the ultimate decision maker. Sometimes you just have to take a little bit of a chance. Once you've been doing it a long time, you kind of know what's going to work. You have a sick sense of what's going to work and what's not, what's a little more risky. We're not wasting our time proving things we already know. Sometimes there's a lot of testing and analytics done just to be a little bit of CYA if it doesn't work out. We don't have that environment. That's a credit to Brian Niccol, the CEO I've worked with a couple times. Our collective attitude is, 'We trust you guys to make the right calls and do the right thing.' So we don't have to spend a lot of time testing stuff just for those purposes. We test to make sure we're optimizing and have the most efficient and effective marketing plan, not for any other reason.

Yeah, well, I think one of the most important things in what you just said was that failure is okay. If you make failure okay and an opportunity to learn, then the tests and learns don't become 'test and prove' or 'test and CYA.' It actually genuinely goes, 'Hey, we really do want to know why this does or doesn't work so we can improve.' I think that's incumbent upon... One of the toughest things about marketing, or one of the things I would advise any marketing person to do, is you really have to have confidence. If he has confidence that I am making a lot of decisions based upon financial analysis... I was a finance person early in my career and made a pivot to marketing when I went back to business school because I liked the idea of trying to figure out what people do and why they make those decisions, and enticing them to make purchases. That was really cool to me, and I like the art part of the job. The financial background gave me a lot of confidence in the numbers. We were doing some pretty heavy duty finance things at the time, so it gives me confidence with the numbers. I understand the margins, how it works. So when he knows that we're measuring all this stuff and trying to be as efficient and effective as we can, and I care... I think you also need to be a holistic business leader. You can't just be the marketing person. You need to... My job is to drive more transactions. It's interesting that there seems to be a lot of talk about this existential crisis in marketing, like 'What is your role?' I'm very clear about what my role needs to be. I need to build sales today and the brand for tomorrow. Both of those things happen all the time, but some things are more sales today, some things are more brand for tomorrow. You just have to have a balance. I know my job is to bring more people in this year than came in last year, and we need to do the right things to make that happen.

Yeah, I think that's a great analogy. I love that term 'performance marketing' for digital and things, because all of your marketing should be performance marketing. You can't afford that it isn't. TV is harder to measure, and cross-platform attribution is harder to measure, but sometimes horseshoe is close enough. You can kind of sort it out. The other part is the interrelationship between those things. People discount that. If you have a really good TV plan, it's going to make all the other stuff work a lot harder. Whether the last click attribution goes to Facebook or TV, no one really knows, but that's okay. If you're kind of looking at those things... We created that marketing analytics group, and we've made it a really integral part. We'll fail quickly and cheaply, and we won't repeat the same mistakes. We'll just keep going.

It was certainly that decision to change to marketing versus finance in business school. Like most people, I didn't know what I wanted to do coming out of college. I went to work for a bank, and then I worked for places that would train you how to do things. When I went to work for a big bank, it was a great training ground. Later in my finance career, before business school, I was much more involved in business development, and I liked that part about figuring out the consumer. When I went back to school, it was interesting. I graduated business school in 1998, feels like yesterday but it was quite a while ago. At that time, I really wanted to get into marketing, and I knew if I was going to make the shift, I had to get a marketing internship. It's not exactly easy to shift careers. I had a great offer from a finance firm that was the darling of the industry at the time, and I had an offer to go to a brand company, Clorox, and do a marketing internship. I chose the marketing internship because I knew if I was going to make the shift, I had to walk the talk, speak the language, know the jargon. I went to Clorox, had a great experience, ultimately got an offer from General Mills. I went there because we liked the brands and the culture. They were another place that taught you how to do stuff. When people ask for my best advice when starting out, I say go places where they're going to teach you how to do stuff, because that's invaluable. I had a finance education in banking and investment banking, then I got a brand education at Clorox and General Mills, and then a real marketing education at places like Taco Bell and Bloomin' Brands. I just felt like the marketing job for me personally would be more fun. I thought, 'They really like my background now. Doing three months at this marketing job isn't going to turn them off to me if I come back.' I thought I was hedging my bet a little bit. But you've got to figure out... I saw this thing yesterday where a guy said, 'People give young people advice to follow your passion. That's the stupidest advice I've ever heard.' He said, 'How are you going to make money at it?' He asked a sergeant major, 'What do you like?' He said, 'I really like math.' He asked, 'Was there anything you like that you can make money at?' I thought it was such a great question. I felt I could be really good at marketing. I think I'm a good finance person, but I worked at this investment bank and saw these guys who could rattle off numbers, and I just... Then you see what your career is going to be like 10 years down the road, and I didn't know if I wanted that. They weren't the model for what I thought my life wanted to be. I thought I would have more fun doing this other thing, and I thought I could be successful at it. I had a good balance of art and science. If I look at my own strengths, the science part has been easier for me because of all that financial and numbers background. It was a hard decision, but at the end of the day, I had a similar decision when I was in college. I went as an engineering major, and I just wasn't as good at it as other people. But I was really good at economics. I was one of the top kids in the class there, and I didn't think I'd be one of the top engineers. So I figured I might want to do something different. I remember when I told my dad I wasn't going to be an engineer, he said, 'I think you're going to be poor.' But that's okay. I think it worked out okay. That was a little bit of 'follow your passion,' but I was really good at economics. I thought, 'Odds are, if I understand money and I like economics because it explained how the world worked and why people made decisions, that seems like a pretty good thing to know. Maybe I can make money out of it.' But there was no grand vision. I don't think I even knew what a CMO was when I was an econ major. Marketing was very foreign to me. I remember being in business school, and people asked, 'What do you want to do when you graduate?' I said, 'I think I want to go into brand management.' They asked, 'What is that?' I said, 'You're kind of the general manager of this business. You own whatever product it is, you own the P&L, and you make a lot of decisions.' They thought that was pretty cool. I think the advice is not necessarily following your passion, but go with what you're good at, because that's going to be helpful.

Yeah, I 100% agree. I think the process right now is completely broken. I've got one who just finished his junior year in college, and my youngest is about to go in as a freshman. It's really tough for kids. It doesn't matter if you have a 1600 on the SAT; you're going to get rejected from places. The amount of rejection these kids have to go through just to get into college is a far cry from when I hand-wrote my essay. The pressure put on them to know exactly what they want to do when they're 18 is an unrealistic expectation for so many kids, but they feel so pressured. I hope they have the courage to find it in college, do some exploration, and change. The best thing you can learn coming out of college is to think, think strategically, and maybe think a little bit differently than somebody else, because that's what's going to set you apart.

You know, I love working at Chipotle. I think our real food is better for you as a person, better for people in general, better for the planet. We only have about 2,800 restaurants; we think we can have 6,000 in the United States. We're just starting overseas. I think there's a huge opportunity. There are a lot of things that are craveable but you don't feel good about them, and things you feel good about eating don't taste that great. We're at this great intersection. I tell my team, the brand purpose at Chipotle is really special. It was underappreciated until I got here. This grand purpose of cultivating a better world, doing things the right way, is core in the company and was there from the founder. It's such a powerful weapon for us. People feel like we're doing the right thing. I tell my team, 'Good guys are supposed to win. We're the good guys, so go win.' The opportunity for Chipotle is still pretty huge. People are understanding the direct connection between how food is raised and prepared and how it affects their health and the environment. The purpose of Chipotle is real; it's not a made-up thing or a chart on the wall. It lives in people's hearts. More practically, we've got some great new items coming down the pike. Cauliflower rice was a big success, last year's carne asada was a big success. We've got an exciting new one coming in the fall. There are a lot of fun things we're doing in marketing. I'm really proud of our Real Foodprint, where we're actually showing in your digital order how you're helping the planet versus conventionally raised ingredients that Chipotle doesn't buy. Ours are more sustainable for the planet. I'm excited to tell those stories. My team is great; there's a lot of great chemistry and nice people to hang out with. When I hire, I look for culture fit. I call it the 'conference room test.' If you have to go into a conference room at 4 or 5 o'clock on a Friday, are you going to be happy to see that person or sad? We're not hiring any of the people we would be sad to see, no matter how qualified they are. Collaboration is a big part of what we do. One person is smart, but all of us are a lot smarter. We need team chemistry. One bad apple does ruin the bunch. I'm excited about the future. I think we're just getting started, three years in. I'm excited about that future and the future of food.