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At last month’s AMAHouston Interactive SIG event, Chipotle Mexican Grill was not only a sponsor. Iliana Rodriguez, the eatery’s Houston marketing consultant, handed out hefty metal coins – each one good for high-quality burrito.
This promotion has the class I’ve come to associate with the Denver-based fast-food chain which is, at the same time, one of the stars in the world of ethical food producers. The branding thread of Chipotle’s “Food with Integrity” manifesto weaves its way all through the company’s online presence; it’s also clearly marked right on the metal coin (which plays an active role on the landing page). Nice weight in the hand, too.
So I’m standing there at the sponsor’s table with Rodriguez and Freeman-Leonard’s Steven Leeper, who’s on the Interactive SIG’s steering committee, and I point out that there’s really nothing new under the sun: This promo-coin thing’s been around for years and years, starting with the old wooden nickel. I managed to cram that together with a (prayerfully) short tale about the “old days” and the 5-cent lunch offers by bars and taverns.
I screwed it up – though I’m hopeful Rodriguez and Leeper will forgive me. First glance, wooden nickels don’t have anything to do with old-timey bar lunches. It is true that some histories identify the wooden nickel with the bank failures of the 1930s; in ’33, Blaine, WA issued round wooden coins when its bank failed. Commemorative nickels are then supposed to be an outgrowth of these legitimate wooden nickels. More accurately, though, collectible wooden nickels have been mentioned in print since at least 1888.
The famous tracer of lost catchphrases, Eric Partridge, puts “Don’t take any wooden nickels” back at least as far as the early 1900s. It’s a warning to be watchful for shady practices or goods. (And for mature ad guys with faulty memories.)
To add to the confusion, I also mixed up the free-lunch-with-a-5¢-beer and the nickel lunch…two different but historically accurate things. The free lunch helped win the 1890s beer wars for Adolphus Busch: With beer at five cents a glass, it was a luxury within the reach of everyone, however humble. The nickel, moreover, included a free lunch.
The nickel lunch was itself a common saloon promotion and quite a wonderful deal depending, I note, on which bar or café you favored with your custom.
Can you believe it? I’ve come full circle. Mangled history can’t keep a good promotion idea down. Here’s Chipotle putting the “nickel lunch” idea back to work not with a paper coupon (too easy to ignore) but with a weighty coin. It not only weighs more than today’s nickel. It’s worth more* at Chipotle Mexican Grill.
Who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch?
*The “rare” 2001 Chipotle coin is selling for $20 on eBay. Thanks to Chipotle Mexican Grill and Iliana Rodriguez for participating in AMAHouston. “New York Bowery lunch counter c. 1910,” 8x10 glass negative, GG Bain Collection, see Shorpy for all the details.
On behalf of water carriers everywhere, thank you, Tom and Nancy Shebesta.
Tom Shebesta is the General Manager of Bottle Mate in Lake Isabella, CA, northwest of Bakersfield. You may not remember as far back as February. I wrote about Ozarka Water screwing up its chance to do a good deed. (Read about that fiasco here.)
But I remembered. And so did Tom, who’s in charge of the “entire” Bottle Mate operation out there in the West.
He called me to ask if I’d ever gotten ‘round to getting a Bottle Mate XL from the Pittsburgh Water Cooler Service. When he found out I had not, he made certain he got one into my hands…and it arrived courtesy of the US Postal Service: Your basic great invention. Patented (1991 317.843). Useful as all get-out. And made to last forever – in fact, it’s guaranteed for life.
Paul L Gagnon invented it back in the ‘70s, from a sand-cast mold…made in his backyard with a hair dryer and casting sand in 1971. His daughter Nancy (see above) used to help him in the product development phase when she got home everyday from high school. The original company was called Port-O-Clamp, Inc.
The original Bottle Mate was made of cast aluminum. The company went to plastic injection-molding in the early 1980s. The Bottle Mate XL, my own pride-and-joy, came out in 2000 because of requests for a larger handgrip.
Now along with my blue nylon Bottle Mate came some sales literature. After reading it, I don’t really know why Ozarka (and its owner, Nestlé Waters North America) don’t follow the simple marketing instructions which Bottle Mate has gone to the trouble of including:
What are your marketing tools? One free Bottle Mate handle…Satisfied customers boast to their neighbors and friends for years.
Tom manages the company founded by his father-in-law and he thinks it’s because these large-scale water companies don’t want to go to the trouble. Okay: Lauren Barack of MSN Money says bottled water is one of those “unnecessary necessities” we can live without. You know it’s true; so do I. Maybe – just maybe – the large-scale bottled water companies will do what smaller, local firms are doing to compete more effectively for our increasingly less disposable dollars. A Bottle Mate promotion could deliver a customer-winning edge.
BTW, I have a family member who prefers the taste of Ozarka to our municipal water supply. So we continue to purchase those 44-pound plastic bottles (without the fancy molded-in handles, too). Fortunately, the Shebestas have been there for me. I used the Bottle Mate XL just yesterday to transport those monster jugs from the front porch to the back.
Thanks to Nancy and Tom, I felt the very model of a modern Gunga Din!
