Howdy, marketer!

Tomato ketchup is technically a low-interest commodity. 

You can buy a private-label store version for half the price, and in a blind taste test, a lot of people might not even spot the difference. 

Yet, Heinz is a popular choice in the US as well as the global ketchup market.

How does a century-old brand maintain that kind of dominance without getting eroded by cheaper store brands or disrupted by hip, artisan upstarts? 

The short answer is that Heinz understands something fundamental about human psychology: when people buy commodities, they are buying certainty. 

They want to know that what comes out of that bottle is going to taste exactly like what they have expected, every single time. Heinz built its entire marketing stack around defending that certainty at all costs.

So, let’s look at some of their best campaigns that helped it achieve this goal.

Starting off with one of my favorite campaigns by Heinz. 

In a restaurant or a diner, condiment costs add up fast. 

For decades, a specific, pervasive trick played out behind restaurant doors: managers would buy cheap, generic bulk ketchup in five-gallon buckets and pour it into empty, iconic Heinz glass bottles sitting on tables. The customer gets served cheap ketchup, but because it comes out of a Heinz bottle, they assume it’s Heinz.

For Heinz, this was a massive brand equity crisis. It wasn't just lost product sales but also product degradation. If left unchecked, it erodes the premium perception of the product over time.

Instead of just suing restaurants or issuing angry legal notices, Heinz turned to packaging design and visual framing as a defensive moat.

They literally altered the label on limited-edition bottles in select markets so that the red color of the label border matched the exact, precise shade of real Heinz Ketchup. 

It was a masterclass in product design as marketing. 

Heinz empowered the consumer to become an auditor. They turned restaurant refill cheating into a public game, making it impossible for venues to swap out the product without getting caught by their own customers.

If people are faking your product, conventional corporate PR tells you to sweep it under the rug, send cease-and-desist letters, and pretend everything is fine.

Heinz did the exact opposite. 

In 2023, alongside agency Rethink, Heinz launched "Ketchup Fraud" - a print, outdoor, and social media campaign that caught restaurant staff red-handed in the act of refilling Heinz bottles with generic ketchup.

This campaign was pure judo strategy. 

It took a real-world problem that hurt Heinz’s bottom line and flipped it into the ultimate compliment. The core narrative was "Customers demand Heinz so fiercely that restaurants are forced to fake it just to keep people happy."

These were the results generated: 

The tagline was simply: "Even when it isn't Heinz, it has to be Heinz." That was the exact customer sentiment that this campaign captured.

A brand reaches absolute cultural dominance when it stops talking about its features and starts proving its place in the collective subconscious. 

Over the last five years, Heinz ran a sequence of campaigns designed to test a bold hypothesis: When people think of ketchup, do they automatically think of Heinz?

Campaign Breakdown A: "Draw Ketchup"

In 2021, Heinz launched an unscripted social experiment. 

They went to people across five continents and gave them a simple, anonymous instruction: "Draw ketchup." 

They didn't mention Heinz. 

They didn't show any logos. 

They just gave people a piece of paper and some markers.

The result was an overwhelming win for brand equity. The vast majority of people drew Heinz!

The brand took these real, messy, hand-drawn pictures from anonymous consumers and turned them directly into their global advertising campaign. 

They put the drawings on billboards, printed them on special-edition Heinz bottles, and turned the footage into short-form video content that went viral on social media.

By letting real people do the advertising for them, Heinz proved that their brand identity was hardwired into global pop culture.

When OpenAI's DALL-E 2 and Midjourney took over the internet, every marketing team was scrambling to figure out how to shoehorn AI into their pitch decks. Most of those efforts felt forced and clumsy. 

Heinz, working again with Rethink, found an angle that tied back to their core narrative of certainty.

They fed neutral prompts into AI image generators: "ketchup," "ketchup in space," "ketchup in a renaissance painting," "ketchup bottle on a beach."

Because generative AI models are trained on billions of images across the internet, the AI returned images that almost always featured the iconic Heinz glass bottle shape, the red color profile, and hints of the keystone label. Even machine learning algorithms, trained on the collective visual history of the web, viewed Heinz as the definition of ketchup.

Heinz turned these AI-generated images into a video spot and social campaign overnight. The messaging was clean, modern, and perfectly aligned with their long-running narrative: Even AI knows that ketchup is Heinz.

This campaign centers on a simple visual observation: across fast-food joints and diners worldwide, classic french fry containers share the exact same silhouette as the iconic Heinz keystone label. 

The campaign leverages brand recognition by pointing out that whenever you hold a standard red fry box, you are effectively holding the shape of Heinz. 

Don’t you love it when design from plain sight is rethought into campaigns?!

To keep a legacy brand fresh, you can't rely solely on grand brand equity campaigns. You need short-term, high-velocity PR plays that spark conversation in culture. Heinz has mastered the art of low-cost, high-impact subversive marketing.

Heinz noticed that hardcore fans were getting the Heinz bottle and logo tattooed on their bodies. 

So, in Brazil, they partnered with famous tattoo artists to create an official, skin-safe red ink made with the exact pigment profile of Heinz Ketchup. They distributed the ink to tattoo shops globally. 

It cost almost nothing in media spend compared to traditional TV, but it dominated lifestyle, design, and pop-culture news cycles.

This was a grassroots marketing initiative by the brand when they realized that restaurants were increasingly swapping Heinz for cheaper or other alternatives.

This was a B2B problem to solve, but Heinz went the B2C route with their campaign. They understood that customers preferred Heinz when they were dining out. So, the brand launched this campaign:

Through this,they created a win-win-win situation for themselves, the loyal customers, and the restaurants. 

Heinz proves that you don't need a revolutionary product to build a marketing powerhouse. You just need to defend your identity ruthlessly, listen closely to how culture interacts with your brand, and never let anyone forget what the original looks like.

✌️,

Tom from Marketer Gems