It’s a tricky thing to control how an brand is used by consumers once it’s out in the world. For instance, Canadian creative agency Rethink learned from its client Heinz that it is a very common custom for restaurants to refill Heinz bottles with cheaper sauces. So Rethink created the “When it has to be Heinz” campaign that playfully calls out the practice and underlines the real value of the brand.
Megan Lang, marketing director at Heinz North America, says that inspiration for the campaign originally came from Snapchat. “We saw someone caught in the act of refilling Heinz with generic ketchup, which prompted us to dig in further, and through social listening we discovered that this was a true and widespread behavior. We thought, what better way to express our core brand belief that ’It Has to Be Heinz’ than to simply amplify an existing consumer behavior in a supportive and funny way?”