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10 Minutes With Chipotle's Ben Mattson
Ben Mattson is a local store marketing consultant for Chipotle. His job description involves “both national and grassroots efforts for marketing and sharing the story of Chipotle.” He spoke at AdFed’s Green Marketing event last month with Melanee Meegan from Peace Coffee. In addition to speaking, they both sat down and did exclusive interviews for AdFed. Below is a short conversation with Ben Mattson.
What’s the biggest challenge for marketing Chipotle the way you do?
It’s not the ability to say “no” to a group, but the fact that we are approached by so many people...we work with a couple hundred schools in the market, a couple hundred community organizations in the market. As (either) the promotional budget or the time budget gets crunched, we can’t do what we want to do for everybody.
For those who didn’t come to this event, explain what your week is like.
Working with different groups and different demographics. A typical day would be for me to go a restaurant, check in with the local store marketing that’s happening right on the ground...go out into the community and make several connections in a day and try to implement that “rinse and repeat” for them...we want to continue the pulse of our marketing efforts.
What is Chipotle’s greatest strength as a brand?
I think our greatest strength as a brand is our food with integrity commitment, which is more of an evolution in business integrity. It stems from everything; from the black beans to the way that we wash our hands to the way that we drive our fleet of hybrid company cars. We make a commitment to “respect” the animals, the farmers, the land, and the people who are coming to Chipotle every day to eat...
What are some of the things that Chipotle does to support it’s green efforts?
I hope this is a long interview (laughs). I’ll give you a few off the top of my head. Our beans are 35% organic, growing every day because A -- we open restaurants every day and B -- contract new farmers to get more organic beans every day. Our sour cream and cheese is rBGH-free....so, every one of those things is a sustainable green effort that keeps us from deteriorating mother earth in some way, shape, or form.
What are some common misconceptions that people have when you talk about green marketing?
I think one of the biggest problems with green marketing is proliferation of the words “natural” and “green.” There is a restaurant company that is fast-food and not in our category that said, “We have all natural chicken.” And all that meant is at one point, the chicken had a pulse...When we take something and we say naturally raised, we mean, given a pretty decent life...so if you put them apples to apples, it’s clearly not the same.
In your opinion, what do you think Chipotle can improve, in terms of its marketing?
I think one of our biggest areas of opportunity would be reach. We have a really substantial program for our evolution of integrity. We really have an audience who doesn’t know much about it. We’ve found over a long time that we have a lot of people who don’t know what Chipotle does but they like the taste of the burrito. We’re happy for those folks, (but) we just wish they were in on the loop.
