2022 Winners & Shortlists

Why is this work relevant for Creative Strategy?

Heinz, was a global giant and a local market leader; but with great success comes even bigger stagnation. We had to reinvent ourselves and get creative with how to widen our horizons. We couldn't tap into new consumers; because we had them. Studying the consumer behavior and market trends we found the winning ticket; we needed to increase consumption per capita. Egyptians had a strongly routed misconception that Heinz was used only on western food. With such a highly opinionated culture, we dove in nose-first to introduce a new controversial consumption occasion, using local authentic dishes, four local food legends.

Background

With local retailers competing with extremely low prices, Heinz always prevailed due to their quality and consumer preference to the taste. Heinz always took consumer-obsessed to a new level and constantly showed their vision; to sustainably grow by delighting more consumers globally. Globally, Heinz would select the brands and tailor products to adapt to different markets. Having been the Egyptian market leaders for so long but with zero growth we needed to correct the misconception and increase consumption per capita. Key objectives: 1) Ads viewership & engagement 2) Sustain and gain +50% market penetration in Egypt by 2020 3) Sustain and gain +50% market share in Egypt by 2020 4) Increase consumption per capita by 3x in Egypt

The Interpretation of the Challenge (30% of vote)

There existed a huge gap between the brand promise and brand values that Heinz stood for and what was happening in Egypt. The brand wasn't being tailored to the consumer and their consumers limited the use to a very specific occasion. It wasn't that they didn't love the brand, it was just that they loved the brand on-occasion. We needed the existing target audience to completely change their mindset and the way they view and use our product; using only our communication. But Egyptians are hard-headed and stubborn; if something works they don't come close to it. We needed consumers to buy into our idea and start using our sauces on a daily basis with every single plate they consume.

The Insight / Breakthrough Thinking (30% of vote)

Conducting research alone was a challenge! Consumers knew ketchup meant Heinz, but now Heinz only meant western cuisines. Knowing the influence and purchasing power of youth, we focused our efforts on understanding the Gen Z's. We conducted research and surveys to understand; the Egyptian youth's behavior and consumption patterns towards food. We found that people mainly focused on three things: 1) controversial food combinations, 2) food challenges, 3) fastest consumption. Building on these findings, we conducted an experiment; we got one person within a group to add ketchup and mayo to different dishes and monitored the reactions! Although this created a heated conversation, we realized it was never a negative one. Our key insight from the experiment; Ketchup and Mayo are western sauces; and associated with western food, only. We decided to change the narrative into a food fight and good fight between them; introduce a controversial consumption occasion.

The Creative Idea (20% of vote)

But it was still tricky to get to consumer's hearts. So, instead of your average chef, we sparked the trend with a catchy tune from a national food icon, El Brens. For foreigners; El Brens is a tourist site, and for locals; his trip, is cause for a celebration. From owner of the infamous food chain restaurants, to the ambassador of food combinations; El Brens challenged the norm and urged consumers in an entertaining yet authoritative way singing, Heinz Ketchup; "It works". The first film featured El Brens with his infamous chicken liver dish, introducing the concept. The second film features El Brens along with three other national favorites and widely-known food icons from different home-grown categories; creating a ripple effect and introducing their specialty plates in combination with Ketchup and Mayo. Striking a chord with consumers was difficult, our only chance was using deeply-rooted highly-trusted advocates.

The Outcome / Results (20% of vote)

Heinz Sauces, increased their 80% market share to 85%, 76% of existing consumers increase consumption per capita by 5x, and ketchup saw a 3% volume growth in the first month. A strong digital debate between consumers leveraged the #Heinz_works challenge which was moved to Tiktok and 67K users contributed by creating their own dishes using Heinz sauce. Organically, the first film saw 160K views on the first day, Youtube cost-per-view was -30% vs. industry average, and four times the average click-through-rate on all social media platforms. Given tiktok's popularity amongst the youth; our second film saw a staggering 1.5B views worldwide, 120M views in Egypt with a benchmark of only 40K. And with ElBrens inviting other local brands, the rest felt comfortable and promoted their own; Heinz-with-our-specialty-plate edition. We managed to carry the brand from success, to more success.

Please tell us about how the work challenged / was different from the brands competitors

Our competitors communication strategy focused and hammered on the continuous consumption of Ketchup and Mayonnaise on westernized food, no risks were taken, no occasions created, and no loyalty lasted. The moment we launched our campaign, using a what-is-known as a western sauce on authentic Egyptian food, the controversy fired up. As a result, the rest of the market lost its shares to us and automatically followed our lead in terms of communication. We maintained our strong market-leading position and became an integral part of, what-can-you-add-ketchup-to fight, till this day. Our argument and new consumption occasion, hit home.