News

Report: Despite food-safety issues, Chipotle maintains strong emotional bond with customers

August 17, 2017

Despite Chipotle's numerous food-safety issues, the chain has managed to keep a strong emotional bond with its customers, according to MBLM, a Brand Intimacy agency that studies the success of brands based on their emotional connections with customers.

The 2017 report — which analyzed 6,000 consumers'reponsers and 54,000 brand evaluations across 15 industries in the U.S., Mexico and UAE —  ranked Chipotle No. 2 (second to Starbucks) in the fast food category when it came to brand intimacy. Fast food ranked eighth overall out of the 15 industries studied.

"Brand intimacy is a new paradigm that leverages and strengthens the emotional bonds between a person and a brand," according to the report, which found that top ranked intimate brands continued to outperform the S&P and Fortune 500 indices in revenue and profit over the past 10 years.

Bonding with customers

Chipotle ranked 64th in the study overall, out of nearly 200 brands, with a Brand Intimacy Quotient of 30.8. It beat several dominant brands, including the remaining eight in the Top 10 for the fast food industry: McDonald's, Pizza Hut, Subway, Domino's, Wendy's, Dunkin Donuts, KFC and Burger King. Chipotle also ranked first for men in the fast food industry and performed well with millennials.

"While it has a mixed Brand Intimacy profile, Chipotle has a lot going for it, including having more intimate customers than any other competitors," Mario Natarelli, partner at MBLM. "However, we believe that it needs to make and demonstrate tangible change in terms of its food safety controversies to build stronger bonds with consumers."

In the past years, Chipotle's popularity has grown exponentially from 16 locations in 1998, to 2,250 in 2017. Nonetheless, it has had food safety catastrophes along the way – including the 2015 outbreaks of E.coli and norovirus and the summer 2017 norovirus outbreak and rat incident in Dallas.

This makes Chipotle an enigma, according to MBLM.

Can Chipotle get even closer to its customers? 

MBLM found that Chipotle has an impressive number of customers experiencing intimacy, mostly in the earliest stage. The stages of Brand Intimacy measure the depth and intensity of brand relationships, and Chipotle leads the fast food industry for customers in the first stage —  sharing —  with 21 percent.

"Its success in this stage is likely a result from the explosive growth while still being relatively new to the category," according to the report. "Although sharing is important, it does not reflect a strong commitment like the bonding stage or co-identification like the fusing stage. Chipotle must assure customers that it is trustworthy so that more will begin to transition to the later stages of intimacy."

Although Chipotle is the second-most intimate fast food brand, it scored below industry average for every archetype except fulfillment (29 versus 27), which relates to exceeding expectations and delivering superior service and quality.

"Low archetype scores for a relatively high-ranking brand indicate that although consumers are connecting with the brand, they are not forming strong associations with it," the report found. "This could also be related to Chipotle's youth, but it says something about how the brand communicates and the resulting consumer perceptions.

"There may be a disassociation between what Chipotle says and does —  as it defines itself as having a commitment to 'Food With Integrity' and that it goes above and beyond the standards of a typical fast food chain. A brand that defines itself this way should be serving safe food and avoiding any outbreaks."

Chipotle, however, excels in the Net Promoter Score. With an NPS of 26 percent, it is the second-highest in the industry behind Dunkin' Donuts, which has a score of 36 percent. NPS is a reflection of customer satisfaction and it seems to be the one of the strongest aspects of Chipotle's brand, according to the report. The satisfaction may be correlated to the brand's solid fulfillment score.

"Hopefully this means that despite the recent incidents, Chipotle will still bounce back and learn from its mistakes," it said.