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Ask someone to draw ketchup and they will not draw ketchup. They will draw a bottle.
Heinz tested exactly that. In January 2021 its agency, Rethink, ran an anonymous experiment. No logo on the table. No brand in the brief. People were handed a pen and one instruction: draw ketchup.
97% of them drew Heinz.
Not a red blob with a lid. The shape of the bottle. The label. The tomato on the vine. Some of them even put the 57 on the neck, which is a remarkable thing to carry around in your head for free.
So Heinz did not write an advert. It printed the drawings, wobbly crayon and all, with one line on top. “We asked people to draw ketchup. They drew Heinz.” Posters, print, social and a TV spot. The customers did the artwork and nobody had to be paid in anything but chips.
A year later they ran it again with a machine. Type “ketchup” into DALL-E 2 and what came back was almost always a Heinz bottle. The internet had learnt the same picture as everyone else.
In 2024 the platform behind all of it, “It Has To Be Heinz”, won the Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix at Cannes Lions.
Here is the part worth stealing.
Most brands pour their energy into being remembered by name. A name is the last thing to arrive. What sits in someone’s head first is a shape, a colour and one oddly specific detail. That drawing is already there before they have decided to buy anything.
And the drawing only exists because Heinz left it alone. Decades of the same bottle did the expensive work long before anyone picked up a crayon.
Now look at how most businesses treat their own picture. A new logo because the old one felt tired. A packaging refresh because a competitor had one. A new colour because someone senior got bored in a meeting. Each one is a small pass of the rubber across the page. Nobody notices any single stroke. Then one day you ask the customer to draw you and they hand back a blank sheet.
You get bored of your brand years before your customers have finished learning it.
Try it on your own team first. Ask five people to sketch the product without looking. Five different drawings is not a creative problem. It is the brand telling you there is no picture yet.
A brand is not the name people can recall. It is the bottle they draw when nobody has mentioned you.
Sources: D&AD Awards archive, "Draw Ketchup". Strategy, January 2021 and June 2024. Ads of the World, "Heinz: A.I. Ketchup".