When Heinz first got his feet wet in the processed foods industry, it was a largely undefined market as of yet. He knew that he was treading new waters and had to act fast to make the most of the opportunity. But Heinz also knew that getting as many new products out onto the market was not the answer. What he had to do was build a strong brand, one that would make sure his products stood out.
At the time, branding was a relatively new concept for entrepreneurs, but it was one that Heinz was all too ready to seize. Because of the relatively untapped market, Heinz knew he would need some way of distinguishing his products. What was it about his products that would make people buy them over his competitors? In answering that question, Heinz decided to focus on four things: the product’s source, its functional attributes, its perceived quality, and its perceived associations.
In starting with his bottled horseradish, Heinz knew that people would be unwilling to buy a new product that they could just have easily made themselves – unless it was of unmatched quality, that is. Through careful packaging and promotion, Heinz began to associate his products with first-class quality goods. Once Heinz noticed the increasing pace of urban life thanks to improvements in transportation and communications, he jumped on the bandwagon. Soon, Heinz was promoting his products as time and energy savers that were not only quick to cook up, but also healthy and full of flavour.
But Heinz’s branding strategy did not fully take off until the introduction of the “57 Varieties” slogan. Heinz had been riding on a streetcar in New York one day back in 1896, when he saw an advertisement for a shoe store; it read “21 Styles.” “I said to myself, ‘we do not have styles of products, but we do have varieties of products,” recalled Heinz. “Counting up how many we had, I counted well beyond 57, but 57 kept coming back to my mind. Seven, seven – there are so many illustrations of the psychological influence of that figure and of its alluring significance to people of all ages and races that ‘58 Varieties’ or ‘59 Varieties’ did not appeal at all to me as being equally strong.”
With that, Heinz immediately jumped off the streetcar, went down to the lithographers, and drafted up a card with the new slogan. “I myself did not realize how highly successful a slogan it was going to be,” he says. Within just weeks, that new slogan was on billboards, in magazines and newspapers, on hillsides, on all product labels, and everywhere else one seemed to look.
Today, the magic of Heinz’s 57 continues. Despite a rapidly expanded product line, the number stuck with the company. Heinz was not sure why he liked the number, or why it seemed to work so well, but he was happy to take it and run with it. As such, he learned that branding was not always in the planning but in the seizing the opportunity.
Lesson #1: Your Brand is Your Company’s Backbone
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