How Chipotle and Gale Followed a Hunch to Marketing Success

In marketing, identifying the next big thing is often treated as an exercise in analyzing trends. That can be effective, sure. But have you ever noticed how, against all odds, someone, somewhere in our community manages to make a data discovery that solves a problem or creates a new opportunity because they followed a hunch? That’s exactly what happened with the “Chipotle Doppelgänger.” The fast-casual chain has 53 ingredients that can be customized into nearly infinite meal combinations, meaning every order is potentially unique. Chipotle’s marketing team and its agency partner Gale knew that fans of the brand take great pride in how unique they think their “burrito footprint” is; the company’s brand positioning hinges on the very idea of customer uniqueness. How GALE’s Alchemy Platform Serves Chipotle Customer Insights Yet the team knew from the data that even the unlikeliest combinations get repeated. They just didn’t know how much. Nurturing a hunch, Gale's technology team created a program to scan millions of orders every day in real time. They looked for transactions that matched at least eight criteria: chicken burrito, double protein, brown rice, half black beans and half pinto beans, tomato salsa, tomatillo red chili salsa, sour cream and queso blanco on the side, for example. Turns out, there are actually thousands of so-called Chipotle doppelgängers ordering the exact same thing at different restaurants in different parts of the country, sometimes even within minutes apart. From that discovery, the idea was born: What if Chipotle highlighted this strange serendipity (and lack of burrito uniqueness) to customers as a way to increase loyalty via email marketing? “We figured customers would find this interesting if we could prove to them that someone else loves their Chipotle in exactly the same way,” Jason Scoggins, Chipotle’s vice president of loyalty and marketing, told Adweek. “Doppelgänger” helped generate $4.8 million in incremental revenue in the first six weeks after launch and earned Chipotle and Gale, as the brand’s loyalty and CRM agency of record, a gold Lion at the 2023 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in the creative data category. Three years ago, Chipotle had 8 million loyalty members, and digital accounted for 18% of their business. Today, Chipotle has one of the fastest-growing loyalty programs in marketing history at 35 million members, while digital equates to more than half its revenue. The results show that developing the right mix of intuition and data-driven analysis is not only possible but critical to marketing performance and business growth. In Chipotle and Gale’s case, their ultimate success hinged on their willingness to look at the brand from the outside in, overturn long-held assumptions and make three deliberate choices. Brand awareness and engagement over transactions Chipotle reaches about a “Super Bowl’s worth” of people every week, which to Gale executive creative director Jason McCann is an invitation to build a “multifaceted relationship” with members. “We’ve never thought about CRM and loyalty marketing as only driving transaction,” McCann said. “It’s always been for us a critical opportunity for creative and brand storytelling.” By prioritizing brand awareness and engagement over sales, the Chipotle-Gale team focused their creative storytelling on making customers feel “known and valued,” which is also, as it happens, a key goal of loyalty programs. They reasoned that if they made people feel seen, sales would follow. Scoggins shared that the team is “constantly looking at member engagement” and how that engagement affects their interactions with the brand. “Are we able to get them into the app? Can we get them to start following us on socials?” Scoggins said. “How do we get more of a 360-degree touch point no matter the message or channel?” Stories over appeals The glut of email marketing appeals that consumers receive (and mostly ignore or delete) is a function of a strategy built around scale: The more emails sent, the higher the clickthrough rate; the higher the clickthrough rate, the better the conversation rate. But there’s a risk in sending such a high volume of emails: If everything is important, nothing is important, and customers become apathetic. Chipotle and Gale plan their email calendar based on the stories they want to tell for the brand and the viral “moments” customers have come to expect. “We don’t just want to send an [email] message for the sake of sending a message—oh gosh, it’s a Thursday, we need to send our Thursday email,” said Scoggins. Long-term impact over short-term performance The creative process for email marketing puts a premium on the killer headline—that perfect mix of humor, insight and memorability. While the Chipotle-Gale team devote creative energy to writing snappy headlines that grab attention and motivate action, they also operate under the assumption that every recipient is a “super fan” who reads every email from the brand. In other words, they want to tell a long, continuous story rather than an isolated, provocative one. “You could have the best subject line in the world and get a phenomenal open rate, but if you’re not able to deliver on the promise of the headline, then you’ve lost your customer,” McCann said. “More important than the subject line of the current email is the experience they had in the last email.” How MilkPEP and Gale Rebranded ‘Got Milk?’ for a New Generation Chipotle and Gale's recent experience proves that intuition plays a key role in data-driven marketing organizations. The team had a hypothesis—an intuition about what was going on in the data—but didn’t stop there. They tested that hypothesis to learn whether their intuition was correct. It was.