Varieties of Murketing Experience

Browsing recently in the Murketing.com library, I came up on a book called Brand New, by a Harvard Business School professor named Nancy F. Koehn, which came into my possession several years ago for reasons I’ve forgotten. I ended up reading a chapter about Heinz — the man, and the brand. Among other things, it answered for me a question I had wondered about before, which is what that “57 Varieties” promise on Heinz ketchup (and other products) refers to. I’ll get to that in a moment.

It turns out that Henry Heinz was a master of murketing. Sure he used traditional tactics like newspaper ads and streetcar placards and the like, as his company expanded from selling bottled horseradish and pickles to a wide range of processed foods and condiments from 1875 through the turn of the 20th century. But he also distributed lots of souvenirs through exhibits county fairs across the country —
in particular, he gave away thousands and thousands of pickle pins.

“Pickle pins turned men, women and children into walking announcements of the Heinz brand and its most famous product,” Koehn writes. “In the modern language of service management, the Pittsburgh entrepreneur worked to enlist his customers as committed spokespeople or disciples for the company.” Her book is from 2001, so really the even more modern language would call these people consumer evangelists or brand ambassadors, or some such. Heinz himself was more straightforward at the time: Such tactics “let the public blow our horn.”

And the 57 Varieties? Here’s the deal. In 1896, when Heinz was 53, he was riding a train in New York and noticed a sign boasting about 12 shoe styles. His own account:

Counting up how many [products] we had, I counted well beyond 57, but ’57’ kept coming back into my mind. ‘Seven,’ ‘seven’ – there are so many illustrations of the psychological influences of that figure … that ’58 varieties’ or ’59 varieties’ did not appeal at all.

In other words: He made it up! The number 57 refers to nothing in particular, except maybe to Heinz’s hunch that “7” has some kind of “psychological influence” built into it. (See this for more on 7-ism.)

“Within weeks,” Koehn writes, “’57 Varieties’ was appearing everywhere — on billboards and product labels, as well as in major newspapers. Before long, the new slogan had been emblazoned in concrete on prominent hillsides along main rail routes.” Four years later, Heinz put up the first electric sign in Manhattan, a 1,200-bulber at the corner of 23rd and Fifth: “The sign was six stories high, with a forty-foot-long pickle bearing the Heinz name and the ’57 Varieties’ slogan.”