Dear Heinz, Thanks for demonstrating – with your Hagel Chup in the Dutch market - how localised “innovation” at the edges can be a critical tool for building core brand equity, and for forcing reappraisal, with the ultimate objective of driving volume of your core ketchup product as an alternative condiment for chips / french fries (at the expense of mayonnaise).
From what I read, you don’t have any plans to actually make your Hagel Chup sprinkles product widely available, as you might with a traditional innovation move, such as your Tomato Ketchup Zero.
Although perhaps, manufacturing constraints notwithstanding, you’re not ruling out putting Hegel Chup into production given local Dutch consumers’ proven fondness for sprinkling?
And you’re just waiting to see how people respond?
But with Hegel Chup, you’re not making a traditional innovation move in which you release and promote a new product or variant in the hope and/or belief that consumers will buy that very same new product in large numbers.
You’re doing – or so it seems looking from the outside – something more sophisticated.
You’re seeking to take all of the brand equity rewards of an innovation move (brand reappraisal, new news, awareness, consideration etc etc) without actually going to the expense and effort of manufacturing, listing, distributing a new product at scale.
So thanks Heinz for experimenting and for presenting a viable and market appropriate product innovation.
And thanks for using it as a means to build brand equity, deploying it as a vehicle to take on an entire competitive category (mayo) with your core product.
It’s inspiring for the rest of us to see smart moves in action.
Thanks again Heinz. Ned