Heinz Develops “Chicago Dog Sauce”

Perception can change in the blink of an eye in the advertising world. Coming from a solid branding background, we know that anything can happen to a brand in the public eye. Although it’s important to be constantly influencing your target audience to feel and react a certain way to your branding efforts, sometimes those efforts are botched before they begin.

Take the famous Chicago dog, for example. In the western world, we’re huge fans of ketchup, the best of us using it to complement delicious, grilled cheesy goodness, and the worst of us taking it way too far, adding ketchup to poutines or mac and cheese. But we can all agree that in most corners of the world, hot dogs are accompanied by ketchup.

That isn’t the case in Chicago, the home of the Chicago dog, that certainly didn’t get its name from being slathered in something as trivial as ketchup – at least, according to Chicagoans.

This no-ketchup boycott spurred a Heinz campaign where the brand worked to banish the belief that ketchup doesn’t belong on a hot dog.  For the campaign, they pulled the wool over Chicagoan eyes by disguising their original Ketchup recipe as branded “Chicago Dog Sauce” in hopes that people would try the condiment on their specialty dog. Unbeknownst to them, these Chicagoans were about to go on a ketchup-filled adventure with Heinz behind the wheel…

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Read the full article on Ad Week.