“We overpaid for Kraft.” - Warren Buffett\, Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway\, Kraft Heinz’s largest shareholder On 22 February 2019, Kraft Heinz lost a quarter of its value in a day. The shares opened 27% down after the company wrote $15bn off the value of its Kraft and Oscar Mayer brands. Three days later Warren Buffett went on CNBC and said the line above, which is not a sentence you want from your biggest investor. How do you shrink some of the most famous brands in the world? Slowly, and by saving money. After Kraft and Heinz merged in 2015, the new owners ran the business on zero-based budgeting, where every cost has to justify itself from scratch each year. The company found about $1.7bn of savings in two years, cut thousands of jobs and trimmed research. Marketing spend hovered below 4% of sales, roughly half what its rivals were spending. The trouble with cutting a brand’s support is that nothing happens for a while. People keep buying ketchup out of habit, the spreadsheet looks marvellous, and the brand fades like a house nobody has repainted. By the time the damp shows, it’s an expensive job. In July 2019 the company appointed a new chief executive, Miguel Patricio. He’d spent about twenty years at AB InBev, latterly as chief marketing officer, and in his last year there it was the most awarded brand owner at Cannes. Just before he took over, Heinz launched Edchup, a limited-edition bottle made with Ed Sheeran. Patricio’s verdict was short: “We need more of this.” He got it, mostly from Rethink in Toronto. First came Draw Ketchup. People on five continents were asked to “draw ketchup”, with no clue who was asking. Almost everyone drew a Heinz bottle: the label, the 57, the tomato on the vine. One person drew mustard. Heinz put the drawings on its labels, and reported a 12% rise in sales. Then came Ketchup Fraud, which caught restaurants refilling Heinz bottles with cheaper stuff and ended with Heinz as the official ketchup of 33 restaurants and Fenway Park. Then they asked an AI image generator to draw ketchup. It drew Heinz too. In 2024 the whole platform, It Has To Be Heinz, won the Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix at Cannes. That’s the award a campaign can only win by proving it sold something. Look closely and every one of those ideas makes the same quiet point: in your head, Heinz already is ketchup. Marketers call that a distinctive brand asset, the shape, colour or number that lets people spot you without reading your name. Heinz’s bottle had been doing that job for well over a century. It just took a creative team to notice, because a budget line can’t. Three things to borrow from Heinz 1. Ask people to draw your category. It costs almost nothing, and what they draw tells you which brand owns the idea in their head. If it’s yours, use it. If it isn’t, you’ve learnt something. 2. Find the asset you’ve stopped noticing. It’s usually sitting in plain sight: a bottle shape, a colour, a number on the label. The people who work with it every day are often the last to see it. 3. When someone proposes cutting brand spend\, ask when the bill arrives. At Kraft Heinz it took about four years to show up in the share price. A spreadsheet tells you what advertising costs the day you cut it. It takes a few years to tell you what it was worth. Want to make the case for creativity in your own business? Our Creative Effectiveness course shows how the best brands prove it pays.