People love Heinz Ketchup. So much so that superfans are willing to put our iconic ketchup on almost anything. So, we directly asked fans on our social platforms for their ‘crazy ketchup combos’ and used these real answers to inspire an out-of-home campaign that celebrated the crazy ketchup behaviours of specific customers.

Following COVID and 3x cost price increases, Heinz Tomato Ketchup Brand UK equity reached an all-time low (59pp in 2022 vs 67pp in 2018), with private label closing the gap (24pp in 2019 vs 32pp in 2022). Consumers were switching away from Heinz Ketchup, and so Heinz was in need of rebuilding its emotional connection with consumers, reinforcing relevance and superiority versus competitors. In response, Heinz had made a major strategic shift to a new global brand platform. “Irrational Love” was based on consumer insight and celebrating the lengths consumers will go to for their love of Heinz products, and building brand equity in the process.

This was launched with a global film celebrating why, for so many people, “It has to be Heinz” - whether their irrational love was expressed through tattoos or stealing sachets from restaurants. What we were tasked with was finding an equally impactful way to execute this for Tomato Ketchup in the UK in OOH, finding a role for food that goes perfectly well with it.

To achieve this, we looked into British culture around ketchup. We found the surprising combinations that Brits would add their ketchup to - from croissants to our famous Yorkshire pudding.

Following COVID and 3x cost price increases, Heinz Tomato Ketchup Brand equity reached an all-time low, with private label closing the gap. Consumers were switching away from Heinz Ketchup, and so Heinz was in need of rebuilding its emotional connection with consumers, reinforcing relevance and superiority versus competitors. In response, Heinz had made a major strategic shift to a new global brand platform. “Irrational Love” was based on consumer insight and celebrating the lengths consumers will go to for their love of Heinz products, and building brand equity in the process.

We launched with a global film celebrating why “It has to be Heinz” - whether their irrational love was expressed through tattoos or stealing sachets from restaurants. What we were tasked with was finding an equally impactful way to execute this for Tomato Ketchup in OOH, finding a role for food that goes perfectly well with it.

Heinz Tomato Ketchup ignites an unwavering passion that defies logic, which some may call an irrational love. From Heinz Ketchup tattoos to naming babies ‘Heinz’. In order to demonstrate the love for Heinz, we wanted to find another expression to bring this irrational love to life.

We found that people enjoyed the taste of Heinz to such a degree that they would pair it with the most unlikely food, from Bananas to Lobster, Yorkshires to Sushi. We decided to celebrate debate-worthy fan behaviour across OOH & Social to prove the extent of the nation’s love for Heinz Ketchup.

‘It has to be Heinz’ is a platform where campaigns always start with fan truths. We want to reinforce and celebrate the irrational love consumers have for our products - by celebrating how real people think about our product, we demonstrate the love of Heinz more than any message from the brand could.

We knew from research that these examples of fans putting Heinz Ketchup on all sorts of foods were out there - we just wanted to uncover more. To find these examples of irrational love, we used a combination of social listening, as well as asking our fans directly for their ‘crazy love ketchup combos’ on our owned channels. Once we had collected the nation’s response, we selected the most debate-worthy and brought them to life - using people’s real social handles in the final execution.

The campaign started with a social post - reaching out to consumers for their favourite combinations. Once we had these, we brought those combinations to life by recreating them in a shoot, before creating OOH placements. Budgets were maximised in order to drive awareness via everyday placements as well as in high-footfall and high-impact locations like the Cromination to drive fame. To successfully launch, we aimed to revive our iconic status with an equally iconic campaign, reaching 94% of the UK population.

This campaign, a love letter to the nation’s Ketchup lovers, shifted key Heinz TK equity-driving perceptions, particularly those that drove affinity to our brand (+20 point contribution). Trust, a metric that had taken a hit by inflation, rose by 12% post-campaign, and we saw a 10% uplift in ‘brand my family loves’, showing effective laddering into our goal to drive meaningful differentiation for key audiences. We also achieved 39,232,375 in unique reach and 285,212,258 total impressions.