Chipotle's Dishonest Marketing

Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc. is a chain of restaurants in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and France, selling delicious burritos and tacos. We all love Burritos. So it's not surprising that Chipotle’s mexican food has millions of fans on social media. (Twitter.com, 2014) It was truly peculiar when Chipotle all of a sudden started conveying insane tweets through its Twitter account. Lets take a look at the tweets which they sent out:

(Eileen Brown for Social Business | July 23 & Eileen Brown for Social Business | July 23, 2013)

These tweets were passed on from Chipotle's official twitter record and Chipotle clarified and gave off an impression of this being the work of some employee called Joe who was conversing with his Siri empowered phone which presented all that he said on their twitter channel. It brought on a considerable amount of noise for Chipotle, quite a few people clowned about how Chipotle employs maniacs and retards "hunting down avocados". (Williams, 2013) It was a hilarious screw up, and thousands who'd never at any point knew what a burrito was were actually following Chipotle. The probably hacked tweets, which have still not been erased, were retweeted around 12,000 times. (hkamarcom, 2014)

(Eileen Brown for Social Business | July 23 & Eileen Brown for Social Business | July 23, 2013)

At the point when reminded that the brand ought to erase the messages, "Joe" from Chipotle tweeted:

Nah, nobody was hurt, so it's all good – Joe (Twitter.com, 2014)

The surprise came however, after chipotle later conceded that it was all a publicity stunt! (Themarysue.com, 2014)

Consequences and Recommendations

Chipotle has not taken into consideration the risk of losing reputation. Once customers write something inappropriate about the company’s goof up, it can attract unnecessary attention from more users to find out what actually happened. It later highlighted that it was a staff mistake, which can again point out to weaknesses in the company. All this can lead to the customers questioning the reliability of the company. To avoid this in the future, Chipotle can focus on conducting more training among its staff for appropriate behavior in the context of Enterprise 2.0, and also make its policies more stringent so that such acts can be avoided to the fullest extent. They can also conduct usage monitoring from time to time, to check any inappropriate behaviour and prohibit it from occurring.

Also, according to Rogerson’s ethical principles, Honour and Honesty have not been maintained by Chipotle. To avoid this, they should establish and communicate some policies to the staff. In Chipotle’s case, it should have policies about when and how they can use the company name, introduce a guidance behaviour and train to accept personal responsibility.

Legal risks
  

The legal risks that Chipotle could be facing are Misleading and deceptive conduct, Organisation’s liability for employee acts of defamation and Reputation risk. Chipotle are liable for issuing statements on social media, knowingly that they are false. They should rather also remove others comments which are known to be false, or else are liable again.

Chipotle is also liable for the acts of its employees, if the employee was engaged by them to perform social media tasks. In Chipotle’s case, they used their employee’s name deliberately as a marketing gimmick. Furthermore, the Reputation risk of Chipotle would also have to be very carefully looked at. This risk can cause a lot of damage to the company’s brand name, which comes from a lot of dedication and investment, of time and money. This is an intangible impact that is faced by Chipotle, as their hard earned brand name is facing the axe.

Chipotle has always bragged with a tagline “Food with Integrity”. Yet after their deliberate social media screw up, perhaps they must consider changing “integrity” to "deceitful". Does the word dishonest mean anything anymore? Was it a savvy move? Did they really need this disgusting publicity stunt? Possibly yes. Because when I read that Chipotle got hacked, the first thing I considered was "maybe I ought to go get a burrito!"

REFERENCES

Chipotle.com. (2014). Chipotle: Food With Integrity. Retrieved 25 September 2014, from http://www.chipotle.com/en-us/fwi/fwi.aspx

Eileen Brown for Social Business | July 23, 2., & Eileen Brown for Social Business | July 23, 2. (2013).Chipotle's Twitter fail. User error or marketing genius? | ZDNet. ZDNet. Retrieved 25 September 2014, from http://www.zdnet.com/chipotles-twitter-fail-user-error-or-marketing-genius-7000018425/

hkamarcom. (2014). Was Chipotle’s Own Twitter Hack … Wack?. Retrieved 25 September 2014, from http://hkamarcom.com/was-chipotles-own-twitter-hack-wack

Themarysue.com. (2014). Retrieved 25 September 2014, from http://www.themarysue.com/chipotle-twitter-fake/

Twitter.com. (2014). Chipotle (@ChipotleTweets) | Twitter. Retrieved 25 September 2014, from https://twitter.com/ChipotleTweets

Twitter.com. (2014). Chipotle on Twitter: "@Tekwani Nah, nobody was hurt, so it's all good. - Joe". Retrieved 25 September 2014, from https://twitter.com/ChipotleTweets/status/359156946164658176

Williams, T. (2013). Chipotle Employee Completely Screwed Up Their Twitter Feed. Sick Chirpse. Retrieved 25 September 2014, from http://www.sickchirpse.com/chipotle-twitter-disaster/