You Say Tomato…

Heinz and the Trust Game

Okay, my knee-jerk reaction was WTF? But then I sat myself down and looked through all of the work done by Heinz recently and the reality is that the work done by SOKO for Heinz with their red tattoo ink is pretty fucking cool. And so is the work by Wunderman Thompson Turkey with their disruption of “Ketchup fraudâ€, utilizing the Pantone color. And there is Heinz Canada with drawketchup.ca. And finally, there is the US with their campaign against ketchup fraud. It’s the least interesting of all of them creatively, but it is still laddering up to the bigger idea/benefit for all of the campaigns…and that seems to be trust.

I couldn’t find anything about consumers losing trust with Heinz specifically, but somewhere along the way someone at Heinz saw both the forest and the trees—probably a combination of their own research and the many, many studies out there on the issue of consumer trust. In 2015 it was reported that Heinz was the most trusted ketchup brand in the US in The Business Journals via a BrandSpark survey. By 2020, the CEO was quoted as saying that Heinz will be innovating less because consumers want to experiment less—they want comfort and trust in times of uncertainty. In the same article (https://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Article/2020/04/30/Kraft-Heinz-Q1-In-times-of-uncertainty-consumers-turn-to-brands-that-they-trust.-They-want-to-experiment-less) there is talk of the resurgence of “Big Brands†versus smaller boutique ones and that consumers were/might be returning to big brands…if that was the case then, something has happened since then.

Depending upon the survey and looking at the timeframe 2020-2023, anywhere between 66% ad 78% of consumers have no confidence in big brands. Whether that is because of customer service, data breaches or any number of other things—consumers aren’t handing out their trust willy-nilly. In fact, in a 2022 PwC study around trust it showed that “…business leaders think they are highly trusted; however, the reality is different. Almost 87% of business executives thought consumers had a high level of trust. However, only 30% of consumers agreed with it.†Ouch!

Whatever got them here I have to say that I’m glad to see that they aren’t going heavy handed and doing a maudlin trust campaign where they say the word trust a hundred and fifty bajillion times…backed by a slow oboe and cello soundtrack that would have been a death-knell. They got a little close with the supposedly hilarious campaign below. (I don’t see the funny, but maybe someone can explain it to me.)

And while the insight supposedly came from a snapchat video and there is a consumer engagement part on the back end, it’s still not as charming or immediate the other campaigns from Turkey and Brazil…especially the one from SOKO as anyone with even just one (or maybe 18) tattoo knows that tattoo pigments, especially red, are problematic given some of the ingredients.

Anywhoo, the bottom line is that Heinz did a good job telling a trust story at a time when building trust (or building trust back) is needed. I’m interested to see what happens next and how they continue to build out this story arc.