Chipotle's "The Scarecrow" Campaign: Why it Worked

If you haven't watched Chipotle's "The Scarecrow" video do so now here.  This is the epitome of a marketing campaign gone viral.  Within 2 days the scarecrow video had people talking.  This video made people feel many different emotions from angry to awed.  There's no mention of the brand until the last 30 seconds of the video.  There's also no people or no talking in the video. "The Scarecrow" tells an emotional, dramatic story about a scarecrow who lives a monotonous life in which he works for the evil, robot crows who are the owners of a large processed food industry, CrowFoods.  It seems as if the robotic crows are controlling the scarecrows and how they think and live their lives.  The scarecrow has an epiphany one day, quits his job and realizes he can make his own fresh, unprocessed food and eventually opens up his own small restaurant in order to "cultivate a better world."  The video got mostly praise, but also some backlash too. This video has reached more than 13 million consumers to date, an enormous accomplishment in itself.  At the end of the video, it prompts watchers to download and play the scarecrow game available in the app store.  Why was this video so popular among consumers? It made people think and feel.  It made some people question what they were putting into their bodies.  It made other people question Chipotle and their motives, citing that some of the information that was posed in the video wasn't the full truth.  The arguments for and against "The Scarecrow" video are appealing on both sides but Chipotle has done what it set out to do: get you, the consumer, talking, thinking, and sharing your thoughts and ideas about their brand.  In my opinion, it's a genius marketing campaign.