Question

As a Marketing Coordinator working at Chipotle, you are responsible for coming up with marketing activities for Chipotle corporate as well as individual Chipotle franchisees. Recently, Chipotle's brand equity has been eroding, and you have been asked to develop a strategy to reverse this trend. However, you are uncomfortable putting together a strategy without doing some research first. Therefore, you must create a research request very similar to the research request discussed in Chapter 3. For this assignment, the research request will be outlining several key areas. The key areas are as follows:

Background
In this section, you will provide a brief background of Chipotle and then describe the origin of the problem. You have free reign in this section, which means you can be creative and "invent" some things about Chipotle's problem. However, the research questions that follow should line up with this section. Two paragraphs should suffice for this section.
Decision Problem
In this section, you should succinctly state what the overarching decision problem you have. This section should only be one to two sentences.
Research Questions
In this section, you should state five research questions you hope to address with this research. Each research question should be a short paragraph explaining the question, why it is important to know, and the type of information you hope to get to answer the question. The research questions in this section are broad questions. For example, "Understand the demographics of Chipotle's loyal customers" is a broad research question, while "What is your age" is a specific question that may be asked in a survey, but should not be part of the research request.
Research Questions Priority
In the event resources are limited, you need to prioritize your research questions in this section and provide rationale for the way they are prioritized.
Populations and Subgroups
In this section, you will clearly define who will be participating in the research. In other words, who is the target population for this research. If there are any subgroups you want to ensure are represented, you should indicate that as well. Provide reasoning for why the selected population (and subgroups, if applicable) is important.

Answer 1

I am Marketing Coordinator working at Chipotle, I am responsible for coming up with marketing activities for Chipotle corporate as well as individual Chipotle franchisees. In the recent years the Chipotle's brand equity has been eroding so I have been asked to develop strategy to reverse this trend. So, I need to do the research for the strategy development. Hence, the research is done as follows:

Background

Ells was graduated from the Culinary Institute of America. He had dreamed of opening a fine-dining restaurant. He does not have funds. After graduating, he worked as a sous chef at Stars Restaurant. In 1993 he opened Chipotle as a way to make money to fund his fine-dining restaurant. The restaurant quickly gained traction with its fast yet quality food service Now, the company is to over $826 MM in revenue with over 37,000 employees.

The problem was that the company has lost the trust in the general public due to incidents of food-borne illnesses over the past few months. This problem was arising from the ad as they released a haunting animated video featuring a scarecrow that observes the horrors of automated farming.

Decision Problem

The overarching decision problem the company has how to tackle the problem as the peoples are getting ill by having their food. Although they follow the food safety standards still they losing the market of the company.

Research Questions

Five Research related questions are as follows:

1.The illness issue caused by which product usage by the customers by geographical locations of the business. This is very much important by the company that where the issue has been raised means it which location or branch of the company. Because location has been identified then we mainly focus on their management or way of doing business. It helps to find out the problem is in system or in the particular small level. We focus on which branch or branches, who was dealing the management, who is the resources provider, what are the safety laws, who are the employees in dealing with the customers etc.

2. The product Supplier of the resources to the company. The product supplier may be different for different locations of the business. Hence, there may problem with the food stuff which they supply. It is important to know the issues related to the suppliers, their circumstances, rules and regulation of the government etc. the questions raised here are name of the suppliers, regulations of the government, circumstances around the supplier etc.

3. Effect of the issue over the loyal customers of the company. In order to know the exact loss to the business we have to focus on the customers of the business. This is important to regain the trust upon the business. Age of the customers loyalty after issue and before issue, number of customers remained with the business products etc.

4. Reasons of arise of the issue. It is very important to know before rectifying the issue is that how the problem has arisen in the business. Circumstance of the arose of the problem or issue is very important to know here.

5. The planning done is order to rectify it and how effective it is. This is important for making the new plan as what has been done to rectify the problem or issue. This shows that the level of progress in order to make out the losses of the business. In which level the business is now, what strategies has been used to rectify the issue, how much effective the strategies are etc. questions has been raised here.

Research Questions Priority

Priority has been given as follows:

Question1, Question 4, Question 2, Question 3, Question 5

The above order is used here as first the where the issue has been found out, then we have to know that what are the reasons for the issues, who suppliers the raw material, then what is the effect of the issue over the customers who are loyal to the business then what are the measures has been taken to rectify the problem so as from where we need to proceed has been done here.

Populations and Subgroups

Target population for the research is customers of the company, employees of the company, management level of the company staffs and product suppliers.

These are important as they are related to the problem in any way who may affect the business.