Welcome back to The Shoppe! This week we’re covering targeting Millennial and Gen Z audiences, Chipotle’s National Burrito Day giveaway, Volkswagen’s April Fools rebranding stunt, and more. Make sure you subscribe so you can be notified every time we post and be on the lookout for tricky marketers looking to pull a fast one on consumers this week!

When it comes to building a successful brand that is targeted towards Millennial and/or Gen Z consumers, startup companies need to drift away from their back-to-front branding strategy and start driving new consumer trends instead. The Millennial and Gen Z audience is more often influenced by self-education through social media and other channels, rather than fixed habits or brand loyalty. With this being said, their habits and interests are constantly in flux. Companies that choose to follow along with these ever-changing consumers tend to find themselves regularly having to reinvent their identity, which could lead to them dropping market share drastically. Therefore, instead of attempting to time the market around this audience, the smarter option here would be to invent the new consumer habits through categories of product and subsets of brands within these categories. Both the way Millennial and Gen Z consumers interact with brands and the cause behind what captures their attention spans, are changing at an unmatched rate. As these attention spans shrink, the ability for firms to keep brand loyalty becomes more difficult and category build is needed. This presents the opportunity for industries to systemize branding rules that are less vulnerable to changing industry trends. It will be interesting to see what companies come up with and what consumer habits will be created to target these audiences. 

Chipotle’s National Burrito Day Giveaway

To celebrate National Burrito Day on April 1st, Chipotle Mexican Grill will be giving away $100,000 in free burritos and $100,000 of bitcoin cryptocurrency. Their “Burritos or Bitcoin” microsite will give users the chance to guess the correct six-digit passcode to unlock the prizes. Bitcoin has gained a heightened amount of attention after billionaire Elon Musk made the announcement that his electric-car startup Tesla had purchased $1.5 billion of the cryptocurrency and would begin to accept bitcoins for payments later on this year. Chipotle’s contest taps into this high level of cryptocurrency interest, as the value has jumped to a record of more than $60,000 per coin earlier this month. This contest is an opportunity for Chipotle to continue to build out its first-party consumer data for future campaigns by asking users to register for the chance to win burritos or bitcoin. First-party data is becoming more and more valuable to marketers as audience tracking technologies, such as third-party cookies and device identifiers, are coming to a halt. Additionally, Chipotle has made its first significant investment in a third-party technology company by partaking in a funding round for Nuro, an anonymous delivery startup. The “Burritos or Bitcoin” contest follows various efforts to reach younger consumers through digital channels, similar to Budweiser’s Twitter contest!