<p>The multi-award-winning visionary behind Chipotle, William Espey shares his recipe for connecting authentically and powerfully with customers and employees.</p><p>William Espey is a branding expert known for his pivotal role in creating and developing one of the most significant and successful brands of the last quarter century—Chipotle Mexican Grill. As the company’s “brand voice” for an almost twenty-year run, he played a crucial role in cultivating its growth from its early entrepreneurial roots to the multi-billion dollar chain it became in the U.S. and abroad. From customer-facing advertising and messaging to internal communications, Espey eschewed the conventional, canned, calculated, and characteristically corporate approaches to marketing creative strategy, instead developing Chipotle’s authentic brand voice organically and purposefully as a personal expression of the company’s unique values and culture. </p><p>Espey has since continued his career in brand strategy, expression, and development, assisting organizations as a consultant and internal team builder, expanding his experience and influence into B2C, B2B, DTC, and SaaS—with a consistent focus on how to build authentic brands rooted in organizational core values, no matter the industry or the audience. </p><p>After debuting as a keynote speaker at a TEDx event in 2010, Espey has evolved into a respected business thought leader, sharing insights on consumer engagement, fostering innovation, and uncovering values and culture to cultivate authentic brand expressions—an approach particularly resonant with Millennials and Gen Z as employees and customers.</p>
Chipotle’s Brand Visionary for 19 Years; Business Thought Leader
<ul><li><strong>Generative AI: A Tool for Creative Development—Not Replacement</strong></li><li>Artificial Intelligence has revolutionized the development of creative assets in the marketing world faster than anyone could ever have imagined. Everyone now has access to platforms for generating copy (ChatGTP, Jasper, Wordtune, Grammarly, etc.) and imagery (Dall-E2, Midjourney, DreamStudio, Firefly, etc.) at the click of a button. While the democratization of technology is great for leveling the playing field in a hyper-competitive landscape, general access ultimately generates generic results. William Espey guides audiences through the Generative AI landscape while helping them understand how to use these tools in ways that help stimulate creative ideation but not replace it. He explains how to properly articulate requests to optimize the output, then adapt and expand on the results to create an authentic expression for your brand. Marketing creatives shouldn’t worry that AI will take their jobs—because it requires a human hand to ensure it’s on brand and not bland.</li><li><strong>Unlocking an Innovation Mindset</strong></li><li>The Businessphere moves and evolves incredibly fast. If organizations don’t innovate and adapt to the changing landscape, they will wither and die. Innovation is essential for survival, whether it’s an iterative approach within an existing model, a radical breakthrough, or utilizing new technologies like AI/ChatGTP. Unfortunately, most corporate cultures have built-in antibodies that kill innovation because it threatens the existing “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” business model. William Espey draws on two decades of experience as a brand visionary, showing audiences how to identify anti-innovation antibodies and shift the organizational mindset toward innovation, fueling teams’ ability to survive and thrive.</li><li><strong>Consumer Engagement in a Distracted World</strong></li><li>As consumers, we live in an increasingly fragmented digital landscape, and the impact on brands is enormous. Organizations must now compete with advertisers, social media platforms, a never-ending news cycle, clever teenagers’ viral videos, “influencers,” and so much more. Trying to cut through that noise with a broad-stroke approach to advertising is prohibitively expensive. William Espey helps audiences understand how to strategically target the right audiences with the most compelling message—which requires knowing who and where your current and future customers are, what messaging they respond to, and how they perceive and connect with your brand.</li><li><strong>Customer Experience (CX): Branding is Everything and Everything is Branding</strong></li><li>The sum of each point of contact between your customers and your business is your customer experience (CX). What happens when your customers’ experience and brand don’t match up? William Espey shares how he came to understand that in an organization with 70,000+ customer-facing employees, the only way to align customer experience with the brand is to ensure company culture is actively curated and cultivated. Businesses need to think beyond the obvious, superficial aspects like advertising and marketing and dig into what they really stand for as a company and a culture.</li></ul>