The Shoppe - Chipotle’s National Burrito Day Giveaway, Volkswagen’s April Fools Rebranding Stunt, & More
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.
With the pandemic delaying last year’s Major League Baseball season and reopen, Budweiser plans on offering a pop-up stadium experience in New York and Chicago to evoke the enjoyable memories of attending games in person. The pop-ups will be for the baseball fans who won’t be able to attend Opening Day games on April 1st. The efforts of experiential marketing were suspended for the most part during the pandemic, however, these pop-ups indicate that brands are becoming
interested in the idea once again. In addition to the pop-up stadium, Budweiser has set up an Opening Day microsite that will give Chicago Cubs fans a chance to win tickets to an upcoming game at Wrigley Field. Budweiser is also running a social media contest to choose a small group of baseball fans to throw the first pitch for their favorite team. As Twitter users will share their contest entries in tweets, Budweiser can reach younger fans who rely on Twitter to stay on top of the news and current trends. This Opening Day Promotion is going hand-in-hand with other recent efforts by Budweiser to stand out amongst the advertising clutter. For example, instead of dying its beer green for St. Patrick’s Day, the company shifted the idea of being green into a promotion for sustainable energy. Budweiser pledged to offer enough renewable energy certificates to cover the estimated electricity that the U.S. beer industry uses in a single day. The brand has also been redirecting its media dollars to support COVID-19 vaccine awareness and refrained from running ads for Budweiser during the Super Bowl for the first time in 37 years.
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!
In an attempt to repair its image after the U.S. authorities discovered that its so-called “clean diesel” vehicles cheated on the emissions test in 2015, Volkswagen plans to change its brand name in the United States to “Voltswagen.” APRIL FOOLS! Volkswagen pulled a fast one on both the media and its consumers as a press release earlier this week outlined a hoax Voltswagen makeover and substantial changes to the company’s branding assets. While these April Fools’ Day stunts are not unusual from marketers, Volkswagen took it to a new level and a potentially ethically dubious one. As reporters claim that internal sources at the automaker had lied to them to keep up the stunt, this could potentially aggravate past missteps, such as the 2015 scandal, that have weakened trust in the brand. Volkswagen has recovered some of its mojo with the brand’s prioritization of sustainability in recent years, but it will be interesting to see what the company has planned to recover from this trick!
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