"Draw Ketchup": The Brief That Proved Heinz Owns a Color
Rethink asked people around the world to draw ketchup and then ran the results as an ad campaign, proving that brand equity doesn't need a logo to be visible.
Rethink Toronto gave people a simple instruction: draw ketchup. Not Heinz ketchup. Just ketchup. They did this across multiple countries, with participants of different ages and backgrounds, using whatever drawing instrument was at hand.
The results came back and they all looked like Heinz.
Not because anyone told them to draw Heinz. Because when most people on earth think of ketchup, they’re already thinking of Heinz, whether they realize it or not. The campaign took that invisible fact and made it visible, turned the drawings into out-of-home placements, and let the evidence speak for itself.
The Context
Heinz has been making ketchup since 1876. They’re not just the market leader in the category; in many markets, they essentially are the category. But by 2021, brand equity of that depth is easy to take for granted. Private-label ketchup had grown in quality and shelf prominence. Store brands were packaging their ketchup in similar bottle shapes. Heinz needed a way to assert category ownership that felt fresh without being defensive and confident without being arrogant.
The challenge with marketing a category-defining brand is that conventional advertising tends to undersell the actual asset. You don’t need to tell people that Heinz makes ketchup. They know. What you need to communicate is something more fundamental: that Heinz and ketchup are not two separate things connected by a brand, but effectively the same thing in the consumer’s mind. That’s category synonymy, and it’s one of the most valuable assets a brand can have.
Rethink’s insight was that you could prove this without claiming it.
The Campaign
The mechanics were elegant and low-cost. Rethink recruited participants in multiple countries and gave them one instruction: draw ketchup. No brand was mentioned. No reference image was provided. Participants drew whatever ketchup looked like to them.
The results were consistent across geographies. Most people drew a red condiment in an hourglass-shaped bottle with a distinctive label. Some drew the label in detail. Some drew the unmistakable shape even without color. Many drew the exact octagonal cap. Almost nobody drew a generic squeeze bottle or a packet. They drew Heinz, because Heinz had spent 145 years making itself synonymous with the category.
Rethink collected the drawings, chose a selection that ranged from crude stick-figure attempts to surprisingly detailed illustrations, and ran them as an OOH campaign. The headline, on some executions, was simply “Draw Ketchup.” The drawings themselves were the creative. No Heinz branding appeared in most versions until the logo at the bottom — because the drawings made the point better than any copy could.
The campaign ran in OOH placements and digital, and generated substantial earned media coverage when marketing publications and design outlets picked up the story.
Why It Worked
The campaign worked for a reason that’s both simple and hard to replicate: it didn’t require you to trust Heinz. It required you to trust your own eyes.
Most brand advertising asks you to believe something the brand is telling you about itself. “We’re the most trusted name in ketchup.” “Quality since 1876.” These are claims, and claims require some level of credulous acceptance from the audience. The Draw Ketchup campaign made no claims. It ran an experiment and showed you the results. The evidence was the people’s own drawings. You could disagree with a brand claim; it’s harder to disagree with 50 drawings from strangers that all look the same.
This is a fundamental shift in persuasion strategy: from assertion to demonstration. The brand moves from being the voice making the argument to being the curator of evidence that makes it. That’s a more credible position, and audiences respond to it differently.
There’s also something worth noting about the specific choice to use the actual drawings, unpolished and human, as the creative material. A less confident agency might have cleaned them up or used the drawings as reference for a professional illustration system. Rethink used them as-is, including the wobbly lines and the misremembered labels. That choice preserved the authenticity of the evidence. A polished version of the experiment would have felt like a campaign. The rough version felt like proof.
The Results
The campaign won the Grand Prix in Outdoor at Cannes Lions 2022, along with several other Lions. It was one of the most awarded campaigns of that year, which tells you something about how the industry responded to it: it was seen as an exemplar of a kind of strategic creativity that is genuinely rare.
The more significant result for Heinz is less measurable but more durable: the campaign articulated and documented something the brand had always been true, which means it can be used as a reference point for strategic and creative decisions going forward. When your brand has demonstrably owned a category for 150 years, the right campaign doesn’t build that ownership; it makes it impossible to ignore.
The earned media coverage included marketing trade publications, design outlets, and business press, all of which wrote about it as a story about brand equity and category synonymy rather than as a routine product campaign.
The Lesson for Today’s Marketers
The most interesting question raised by Draw Ketchup isn’t “how do we do this?” It’s “do we actually have this?” Category synonymy is not a strategic objective you can decide to pursue. It’s the outcome of decades of consistent quality, distribution, and memory structures built in the minds of consumers. You can’t shortcut it.
What you can do is audit it honestly. Ask your customers to draw your category. Ask them to describe your category out loud. If your brand name comes up in those descriptions naturally, unprompted, you have something worth building a campaign around. If it doesn’t, you have a different problem to solve first, and advertising isn’t the solution.
There’s also a broader lesson about the difference between share of market and share of mind. Heinz has dominated ketchup sales for generations, but that’s not what this campaign was about. It was about what happens inside a person’s head when they think about ketchup, which is a different and more interesting piece of real estate. Share of mind is harder to measure and harder to build, but it’s also harder for a competitor to take away. Once your product is what people draw when they close their eyes, you’re not just the market leader. You’re the category.
That’s worth protecting. Rethink found a way to protect it by making it visible.
Key Results
- Category Attribution: Overwhelming majority of participants drew a Heinz bottle without being prompted
- Awards: Grand Prix and multiple Lions at Cannes 2022
- Earned Media: Covered by major marketing, business, and design publications globally
SWOT Analysis
| Strengths | Weaknesses | Opportunities | Threats |
|---|---|---|---|
|
|
|
|
Key Takeaway
The most powerful proof of brand ownership isn't a claim you make about yourself; it's what happens in people's minds when you say the category name.
