Chipotle now serving breakfast burritos? Marketing on Facebook.

When I logged into facebook this morning, I thought it was Christmas morning.

Sarah posted new pictures, I’m invited to some idiot lost his phone, it’s Liz’s birthd- Holy crap, “Chipotle now serving breakfast!”

Before anyone gets too excited, I will say that this is NOT true at this time. It was an invitation to join a group hoping to CONVINCE Chipotle to serve breakfast burritos. But, if Chipotle didn’t sponsor this group, they should send free burrito-for-life cards to the people who did.

For a restaurant brand like Chipotle, letting people know about your food choices is tough. There’s a reason why the average In And Out outsells the average Mcdonalds. You know what you want at In and Out. You are in the mood for a burger, fries, and either a shake or a soda.

At MickeyD’s, you are in the mood for an icedcoffeechickensandwichquarterpounderpancakessausagemcmuffin and maybe an ice cream sundae?

But, some would argue that In and Out hasn’t added products because it would be difficult to market them. How does a brand launch a new product? Sure, if your Mcdonalds, and 14 thousand operators are contributing 3% of their revenue to a marketing fund, you have enough money to launch a major nationwide TV ad. (Interestingly enough, McDonald’s didn’t add major new items to their menu until AFTER they had national TV marketing money).

But how many brands really have national TV money? Especially now? For Chipotle’s breakfast burritos, just like a hundred other smaller but powerful brands, this facebook buzz campaign (if it were real) would be more cost-effective.

If you’re a brand manager for a major company, you launch 5-6 new products each year. At my Pepsi office in San Diego, there’s a person who’s main job is to retype the product list every week as we add new products.

Most of those products get lost in the shuffle. Just ask the guy today, who told me his number one problem is that Pepsi has high-fructose corn syrup. He had not heard of Pepsi Natural or Pepsi Throwback. Both made with real sugar!

Saying that products get lost in a sea of advertising white noise is not news. But, imagine using facebook to launch Pepsi Throwback or Natural. Find the natural foods groups, and post a link on their pages to a product info page. Find groups with titles like “HFCS, ruining america since 1916″ and get them in on the act.

And the facebook-user who willingly clicks on an ad for Chipotle Breakfast burritoes is giving you permission to sell to her. She is not tivoing past your ad hoping to get to the next scene of Top Model, or turning the page in Cosmo to find the 168th new way to please her man. She legitimately is looking to find out about breakfast burritos.

The big turn-off at the moment with social networks is that the ads are unreliable. They have zero credibility. This scam proves it. Anyone can put ads on facebook. Right now, they’re basically pop-up ads.

But, look what pop-up ads have turned into. Now most good pop-ups feature streaming video and are major tools. In fact, Gatorade ran a pop-up video campaign on the front-page of ESPN.com when they did the “What Is G” rebrand.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to lobby the nearest Chipotle to start serving breakfast…

Tagged as: brand management, business, chipotle, facebook, food, Gatorade, internet marketing, Marketing, money, myspace, pop-up ads, restaurants, social networks