Yesterday was my wife Pam’s and my 4th wedding anniversary and to celebrate it we went to Bert’s Diner for a cheeseburger. (Longer story as to the significance of us getting married and the cheeseburger but I’ll explain that some other time.) When our burgers came and I went to use the ketchup, sure enough it was Heinz and it wouldn’t come out of the bottle. Thinking about Carly Simon, I used the knife to make it move. Today I had to smile when I saw Seth Godin’s blog talking about Heinz ketchup:
This is really telling, but probably not the in the way Matt intended.
Heinz doesn’t make better ketchup. Heinz makes better Heinz ketchup. There’s a huge difference.
If you define ketchup the way most people do, you define it as, “the ketchup I grew up with.” Or to be more specific, “the ketchup my mom served me, the one that I was allowed to serve myself when I turned three…”
One thing that marketers do is sell us a feeling, not a set of molecules or bits. When you spend $3 on a bottle of ketchup, that’s what you’re buying. And Matt and the rest of us are so brainwashed we rationalize it as ‘better ketchup.’