Heinz's Heritage Advantage

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Heinz's Heritage Advantage

While most older brands desperately try to stay relevant, Heinz keeps winning awards and creating cultural moments that make startup CMOs jealous. They're not just surviving the heritage trap, they're turning their 150 years of history into their secret weapon.

Most legacy brands rest on their laurels. Heinz uses theirs as a launching pad.

Heritage Brand Complacency

Heritage brands often fall into a predictable pattern. They coast on established recognition, playing it safe with conventional campaigns that don't risk alienating existing customers. They treat their history like something to preserve rather than something to leverage.

The result is stagnation disguised as stability. These brands maintain market share through inertia but lose cultural relevance as younger audiences move on to brands that feel more dynamic and experimental.

It's the heritage brand paradox. Their brand assets that could enable bold experimentation (decades of equity, distinctive recognition, established trust) instead become excuses for conservative marketing.

Heinz found a third option.

True Assets

While other brands obsess over logo refreshes and packaging updates, Heinz figured out which of their assets actually drive recognition.

It wasn't their logo. It wasn't even their name. It was the shape of their label and bottle, their classic tagline and their cultural position as the ketchup.

In their "It Has To Be..." campaign, Heinz removed their logo entirely. No brand name. No familiar typography. Just close-ups of their products and the names of foods we instinctively associate them.

70% of consumers recognised it as Heinz immediately.

That's 150 years of consistent brand building creating recognition shortcuts that transcend traditional marketing. It's the kind of equity that money can't buy because it requires something most brands don't have (or aren’t willing to work with). Time and consistency.

The somewhat counterintuitive insight is that having assets this strong doesn't constrain your marketing, it liberates it. When you know what truly makes you distinctive, you can experiment with everything else.

Heritage as Experimental Foundation

Most people assume old brands should play it safe, but Heinz proves the opposite. Their heritage gives them permission to take risks that would destroy a younger brand.

When restaurants in Turkey were refilling Heinz bottles with cheaper ketchup, Heinz turned counterfeiting into marketing gold. They identified the exact Pantone shade of Heinz red and added it to their bottle labels. If the sauce doesn't match this specific colour, it's not real Heinz.

The campaign turned every customer into brand police. Instead of Heinz fighting restaurants directly, customers started calling out the fakes themselves. The result was a 73% decrease in non-Heinz refills and a 24% increase in authentic Heinz usage.

But heritage also provides safety nets for bold cultural risks.

The risk was significant, hijacking third-party platforms without permission. The campaign generated 672 million earned impressions and global media coverage. Younger brands do this kind of clever guerilla marketing because the benefits of increased awareness outweigh any potential negative consequences. But 150 year old companies normally don’t pull stunts like this.

In 2022, Heinz asked DALL-E to generate images of "ketchup" without mentioning any brand. The AI consistently created images that looked unmistakably like Heinz bottles.

But the AI experiment took the same concept further, testing whether artificial intelligence with no inherent brand loyalty or cultural conditioning would recognise Heinz as the visual representation of ketchup itself.

The answer validated everything they'd built over 150 years. Even AI trained on the entire internet recognised Heinz as the visual vocabulary of ketchup.

Importantly, Heinz haven’t become synonymous with the category (a legal issue called genericide), ketchup is still ketchup no matter the brand, but Heinz have about as much market dominance as possible up to that point.

That campaign generated 1.15 billion earned impressions with 2,500% ROI. AI could have generated competitor imagery, undermining their entire hypothesis about category ownership. But that's exactly why the experiment worked so brilliantly.

The Strategic Advantage

Each Heinz campaign builds on previous asset recognition rather than starting from zero. It's a self-reinforcing cycle where strong distinctive assets enable bold experiments, and successful experiments strengthen the assets further.

This creates a competitive advantage that money alone can't replicate. You can copy Heinz's creative ideas, but you can't copy the 150 years of consistent asset building that make them so effective. It's the ultimate moat in an attention economy where breakthrough moments require either enormous budgets or authentic cultural relevance. Brand assets need both strong brand linkage (50%+ of people linking it to your brand) and brand uniqueness (50%+ linking it only to your brand) to be effective. Heinz's distinctive assets clearly pass both tests.

The Courage Question

The takeaway isn't in copying Heinz's tactics, but in finding courage to identify and leverage your own distinctive assets.

Most importantly, understand the difference between playing it safe and playing it smart. Smart heritage brands take calculated risks backed by decades of equity. They experiment boldly because they have strong foundations.

When Heritage Becomes a Weapon

Heinz's story reveals something counterintuitive about modern marketing. In an era of infinite choice and shortened attention spans, the brands that win aren't necessarily the newest or flashiest.

They're the ones with courage to utilise their distinctiveness.

The next time someone tells you legacy brands can't innovate, show them a Heinz campaign. The company confident enough to remove their logo entirely and bold enough to hijack running apps without permission.

When you know what truly makes you distinctive, you don't have to play by anyone else's rules. Heritage isn't the enemy of relevance, it's the fuel that makes true innovation possible.

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