Chipotle CMO Mark Crumpacker is in an enviable position.
He leads marketing for one of the best-performing fast-food chains in the country. The 19-year-old company posted an 11% jump in same-store sales last year, and there’s no sign it will slow. Yet he also has one of the leanest traditional-marketing budgets around.
Mr. Crumpacker joined Chipotle in 2009 as its first chief marketing officer. Not long after, the company ditched the agency-of-record model and brought its advertising in-house.
Chipotle made the change “mostly because it didn’t work several times in a row. … The problem — I can see now — was that we simply didn’t know what the right message was for our brand at the time,” Mr. Crumpacker told Ad Age.