What an Ugly Burrito Can Teach Us About Local Marketing

Many companies focus the majority of their marketing energy and budgets on developing a national brand. This can often be true even for those who do business locally. Although Starbucks and Chipotle mostly behave in our lives like local businesses, we still think of them as brands like Nike or Apple, whose reputations rest on channels of communication like broadcast media and national advertising.

This fact can lead to some odd consequences. Consider that, according to SOCi’s Consumer Behavior Index, 97% of U.S. consumers discover new products, services, and businesses online, with 80% reporting they use online tools to look up information about local businesses at least once a week. But when these same consumers encounter well-known national brands in local search results, they often find a less than optimal version of the brand.

I’ve come to call this the “ugly burrito” story, and I’ll explain why. When consumers search for local businesses using a search term like “burritos near me,” they’ll often encounter a Google feature that we in the local marketing industry call a 3-Pack. It looks like this:

Notice a few things about this result, which appears on page one whenever Google thinks the searcher wants local business results. First, there are only three chances to show up on the first page – and we know that most users don’t bother to visit page two. So this means the competition for top ranking is fierce.

Second, notice how prominently Google features photo content in the 3-Pack result. This photo content, along with the name, ratings info, review snippet, and other details shown for each business, comes from what is officially called the Google Business Profile, where business owners can upload accurate information as well as differentiating features like photos.

Notice that we don’t see any national brands in these top results. Instead, in this example, which shows the results for “burrito near me” in San Luis Obispo, California, we have several well-regarded local restaurants, each of whom has taken the time to upload an attractive photo of a menu item that matches the user’s query. (Google uses AI to select photos that match the keywords users type into search.)

Now, it isn’t easy to take a good picture of a burrito, which can often look like a mess on a plate. If we click past page one, we can see an example of this when we finally get to a Chipotle listing. In this example search, I had to make my way to page three before I found a Chipotle listing at rank position 30, meaning that the country’s best-known burrito brand was outranked for “burrito near me” by 29 other local businesses.

And what do we see in Chipotle’s Google listing? Unappealing photos like these, uploaded by customers:

And yet, we know that Chipotle’s marketing team is capable of taking the best burrito pictures you’ve ever seen. Just take a look at their corporate Facebook page:

Despite this marketing acumen, Chipotle has left the job of uploading pictures to its local Google profiles to random customers. The fact that the company ranks so poorly for “burrito near me” is not unrelated.

In fact, companies like Chipotle all too often disregard the basic local marketing practices that make other businesses – often smaller local competitors – stand out in search. Alongside optimizing their Google profiles with compelling photos (and videos), savvy local marketers also link those profiles to their social media feeds, post offers and promotions, and respond to the reviews left by customers, both positive and negative. These and similar practices help businesses stand out in search results and convert more searchers into customers.

Of course it’s true that customers who want to do business with a well-known brand are likely to search for “Chipotle near me,” “Starbucks near me,” and so on, in which case online profiles merely need to be accurate. But brand loyalty is declining. Some 57% of Gen Z consumers are less loyal to brands than they were before the pandemic, and brand loyalty amongst all U.S. consumers declined significantly year-over-year in 2023 and 2024.

We see evidence of this in client Google data; for a major retailer, we recently observed that branded searches were down 18% year-over-year, while unbranded searches increased by 32%. For many brands who have traditionally focused on nationwide marketing, unbranded local search is a huge untapped opportunity. In fact, SOCi’s Local Visibility Index for 2024 estimates that the total size of the local opportunity U.S. multi-location brands is $54.1 billion per year.

What’s behind this figure are some stats you may find surprising. The average multi-location brand, according to the Local Visibility Index, appears on page one in Google local searches only 24% of the time, responds to only 45% of local reviews, and fails to respond to 90% of the questions consumers ask via Google. As for photos, the average multi-location brand hasn’t uploaded a new photo to any of their Google profiles in approximately 20 months.

In other words, brands may be building awareness at the national level, but too often they’re failing to follow through locally. In fact, some well-known brands like Papa John’s have begun to acknowledge that neglecting local marketing has been a “big miss.”

Larger companies that do perform well are often regional or niche brands that have learned how to compete with local favorites, or innovative companies like Ace Hardware who have successfully taken on big-box competitors by emphasizing customer care at the local level. Brands that take a cue from these examples can find opportunities for revenue growth even in a difficult economy.