Chipotle Mexican Grill wanted to do one thing. In February, the fast-casual restaurant model reported that visitors to its eating places fell for the fourth straight quarter to finish 2025, and it was projecting flat same-store gross sales development for 2026. At that time, the corporate’s inventory had dipped by about 33% over the past 12 months.
The model wanted a lift, and it simply made a serious transfer to get it. Chipotle named award-winning marketer Fernando Machado as its new chief model officer.
Machado’s final CMO function was with plant-based meals firm NotCo, which he joined in 2023 after two years as CMO at Activision Blizzard. However he’s finest identified for his epic run of success—and business accolades—at Burger King from 2014 to 2020 (the final three years as international CMO for BK mum or dad firm Restaurant Manufacturers Worldwide).
On Chipotle’s newest earnings name on April twenty ninth, CEO Scott Boatwright highlighted Machado as an award-winning, globally-recognized model chief. “His confirmed monitor file of constructing iconic manufacturers, driving category-defining innovation and main customer-centric marketing methods is strictly what we want as we proceed to raise our model, deepen visitor loyalty, spotlight the worth of our actual meals, and speed up our long-term development,” mentioned Boatwright.
At first look, hiring a confirmed and celebrated marketer to reverse a gross sales slide seems like a no brainer. However there’s additionally an argument to be made that Machado’s stunt-heavy strengths are a mismatch for Chipotle’s largely earnest model picture.
Combining the sensibilities that attempted to usurp the Belgian monarchy and promote moldy burgers with a model that makes sincerely sweet animated short films is unquestionably a threat that Chipotle is hoping will repay.
Let’s break it down.
Pushing boundaries
Machado believes the best threat a marketer can take is producing “flat” or generic work. He has argued that as a result of individuals at the moment are so good at ignoring the “sea of sameness” throughout most promoting and advertising, a model’s first job is to make sure it isn’t ignored.
Rule primary: Don’t be boring.
To do this, he views risk-taking as a necessity. For Machado, the most important barrier to success is just not an absence of cash, however an organization mindset that’s afraid of uncertainty. He argues that to attain vital outcomes, entrepreneurs should push boundaries and be keen to fail or face pushback.
This method is evident in previous Burger King work that was particularly designed not solely to make individuals chortle but in addition to draw earned media consideration and amplify its attain.
The inventive tech utility of 2018’s “Whopper Detour” inspired individuals to obtain the Burger King app by utilizing geofencing to focus on clients inside 600 ft of McDonald’s areas and sending them coupons to neighboring BK areas for a 1 cent Whopper. It received more than 1.5 million app downloads in nine days.
The visuals of “Moldy Whopper” in 2020 to advertise the chain’s elimination of preservatives from its menu; utilizing an advert in 2017 to hack Google Residence gadgets; and placing backyard grills of former McDonald’s execs in 2018 print ads all match this invoice completely.
This work was enjoyable and intelligent, however typically had an underlying sneer—particularly when it was aimed on the Golden Arches. Machado’s aesthetic thrived in a challenger-brand dynamic, however it’s robust to image Chipotle swinging haymakers at, say, Sweetgreen or Panera Bread.
Earnest eats
Chipotle’s hottest and impactful model work has leaned closely into its earnest outlook on the world, and its function in it. Particularly, its inventive focus has been on its meals provide chain and its work with farmers.
It started in 2011, when Chipotle launched a stop-motion brief movie known as “Back to the Start,” that includes a Willie Nelson cowl of the Coldplay hit “The Scientist.” After the hassle exploded on-line, the model used it as its first-ever nationwide TV advert by airing it in its two-minute entirety in the course of the 2012 Grammys.
It hit the promoting trifecta of thousands and thousands of on-line views, reams of nationwide information protection, and armloads of ad industry awards.
A decade later, to proceed washing the style of its E. coli scandal out of everybody’s mouth, it dropped “A Future Begins,” one other animated brief, this one set to a Kacey Musgraves cowl model of Coldplay’s “Repair You.”
Its long-running “Behind the Foil” sequence highlights actual staff and the work they do to convey Chipotle’s meals to life. The 2023 advert marketing campaign “Human Nature” juxtaposes Chipotle’s strategies with these of its opponents, aiming to point out its nearer connection to extra pure substances.
The theme right here is earnest ambition. Chipotle’s best-known work embraces its wholesome meals in a means that desires to exist above the form of hand-to-hand fight promoting that so typically characterizes fast-food model campaigns.
Sincerity meets stunt-y
On the floor, the approaches of every model’s most well-known works are a mismatch. However wanting nearer, there’s a Venn diagram between Machado and Chipotle that would spell magic.
On the earnest facet of issues, Machado has garnered awards and model outcomes for 2014’s “Proud Whopper” and the 2015 McWhopper, which revealed an open letter in The New York Occasions asking its largest rival to collab on a burger for Peace One Day.
And on the stunt-y facet, Chipotle’s long-running Boorito Halloween promotion provides reductions to individuals who come into its eating places wearing costume. Equally playful, its “Doppelgänger” work paired app customers with the identical favourite orders with one another.
Arguably, Chipotle’s best-known model work has been when it serves a combo meal of honest content material by means of inventive popular culture concepts. Now the model wants the doubtless good pairing of Machado’s pure irreverence with Chipotle’s penchant for talking actually and on to its clients.
Machado’s success will probably be in his skill to layer these flavors in a means that can keep away from the dreaded sea of sameness, and acquire consideration in a means that also reminds individuals why they fell in love with Chipotle within the first place.
