A Rubber Pickle Caused a Riot (The Heinz Pickle Strategy)

You know, we just got a big RV and are doing a big, like, month-long road trip. This weekend, my task is, like, build a little mini office inside my RV. I'm going to screw this mic arm into the table. Yes.

I'm going to, like, build it out. You have to have it. I mean, it's like, your whole entire aid cup comes from that. But also, if you don't have workspace, I've noticed, you, like, have it slide.

You have to have an office. Otherwise, I just get lazy. Yeah. If I'm, like, sitting at my kitchen table, I don't work in your way.

Yeah. So, yeah. are you ready yeah what are we talking about today oh we're gonna do another historical breakdown i love these we haven't done one in a long time can i guess what it's about yes because i i had a thought coming out of the shower the other day it's not weird don't worry shower thoughts are the best though i had a thought about q-tips because q-tips i'm writing that down say that you're not supposed to clean your ears with them yes that's like their official stance yeah and i'm like well then why do they exist and i just i know there's a story behind it i want you because i don't prep for the show i want you to go do the research figure out what happened with q-tips and then i'd be super interested to know like what are they doing marketing wise these days are they doing anything or are they just in cbs that would be so interesting because seriously like if not like for cleaning here why yeah if don't go in here then yeah why why why in my bathroom perfectly shaped for this that's a good one it is not today's stuff it's not cute but okay we'll put that down i'll go find out what happened with q-tips and what's happening somebody check out q-tips i'll figure out if she's doing okay this one though i i truly think that i found one of the oldest examples of influencer marketing oh okay and this one is making me want to buy pickles and there's a distinct reason why yes that is a manufactured hook but is it what's the pickle company Heinz like Heinz pickles Heinz makes pickles I thought they make ketchup are you kidding oh we gotta get into this okay wait so wait when someone says Heinz you think pickles before ketchup you don't guys in the comments please let sarah know i don't know if this is an age gap thing because she's pushing 40 or what you're about to be heinz's ketchup yep i'm gonna hand it to you because this is really interesting that you think ketchup because i'm like one i'm a little embarrassed for you as a marketer that you don't know this story but also this is gonna be fascinating because heinz has not always done ketchup people okay they are well known for ketchup but they have not always done ketchup so here we go Here is 1893.

We are in Chicago at the World's Columbian Exposition. Do you know anything about or what that is or have you heard of? Like the World's Fair, I've heard it called? World's Fair, yes.

No, Chicago World's Fair. This was a fair that was held in Chicago from May 1st to October 30th. So it was a freaking big, long fair. This one lasted six months.

They like built buildings for it. Oh my God, I had no idea. This is crazy. 46 countries were involved.

this was where the very first ferris wheel came into play like all kinds of things um more than 27 million admissions 27 million people back then back then came to this fair just to see what it was about crazy on a single day in october three quarters of a million people walked through the gates so this big big okay this world expo was really interesting because five Morgan Wallen concerts. That's how I measure crowds of people, by the way. I was going to say, does Morgan Wallen like command that kind of audience?

That's crazy. So if you were a company in 1893, a booth here was the single best distribution moment opportunity on earth. You couldn't get better than the World's Fair. Our guy, this one little random dude, was a pickle and condiment maker out of Pittsburgh named Henry Hines.

Henry Hines, of course. That's such an 1893 name. It's such a pickle manufacturer name. I freaking love it.

I'm like, I wish I knew this guy. This poor guy, poor little Henry Hines out of Pittsburgh, selling his pickle and condiments, got the worst booth at the entire fair. He was on the second floor at Merck Gallery of the Agricultural. And this is before escalators existed, I'm assuming.

Oh, my God. Can you imagine? He's also in the worst smelling building on the property. He's in the Ag building.

Like, have you ever been to a, yes, to like a county fair and there's an Ag building and it's just cow. Yeah, it's just cow shit and head and allergies. Oh it just so bad So the stuff that everybody wanted like the stuff that people were actually seeking out was the foreign food exhibit right So that was all the way downstairs on the ground floor People were wandering in just left around basically like jetted over to the foreign food exhibit and then left. Almost nobody was climbing the stairs.

Heinz paid for a spot at the biggest event in the world and basically got stuck in the attic, which I was like, poor little guy. So if you can't move as a marketer, what are you supposed to do, right? I find this so relatable because I'm like, we can't move. I can't get off of Meta, right?

Like I can't not be on TikTok. I can't not be on Instagram. We're stuck in these particular platforms. We can't do anything.

So here's what he did. Obviously, in 2026, the answer would be spend more, but this guy did not. He didn't want to buy a better spot. He actually did something like opposite of what most marketers think out.

He printed thousands of these little teeny tiny cards. hired a bunch of local kids to scatter them on the ground literally just printed a bunch of cards handed them out to poor child laborers that's just that gold dust these all over the ground don't hand them to people just put them on the ground so they were on the ground floor at the midway everywhere every single card promised a free souvenir if you came up to the Heinz booth to claim it so this is the first free example this is like a free plus shipping lead gen offer yes free plus shipping legit offer with micro influencers kids yeah they he didn't send adults out which i would love to stop and talk about like he did not ask i feel like 1893 was probably the pinnacle of child labor um the golden age of child labor some would say this it's not legal anymore don't do this no but but i do think it's important that like uh his his chosen placement if we can call that an ad placement um was unique and cheaper than other placements like this is how i kind of felt about like sponsoring youtube creators eight years ago he's like all right this is like a relatively immature placement these creators don't know what they're worth yet the views are great uh it's cheap for us to get and like it's going to be impactful because not many brands are doing it that's what that's what he did yep yeah he 100 just like took something that was super simple and just was like how do i get people up here i have to make it incentivized right you can't just like assume that people are going to do whatever you want to do so he gave them an incentive up there do you want to see what it was that he was giving away because yeah would love to so bad this is what it was it was a tiny pit the bin i love this story so i'm gonna leave much and you should buy that that's only 40 bucks i'm gonna buy it i'm gonna freaking buy it because i need that that's a cool little piece of marketing history the interesting thing was it's early plastic resin it was not metal it was basically the same stuff they used for dental filings and wire insulation it was like rubber it probably felt like futuristic at the time they all people were probably like look at this for a crazy thing it was a little green heinz tickle with a book that you could like wear it super interesting okay so a couple things red bull did something similar i believe a couple decades ago i think they filled up trash cans with empty red bull cans oh yes i remember this story i think it was them it might have been monster but i'm like 80 sure it was red bull but that was their way of like trying to prove like proof of concepts basically it was showing people like look hey these are empty that means someone drank them And there's a lot of them.

Like it filled up. They filled it all the way to the top with these empty cans. Such a smart marketing move. If you can even like allude to the fact that a lot of people are doing this.

Apple has done it. Heinz has done it. Friggin Red Bull's done it. Like if you can just kind of allude to the fact that a lot of people are doing this without having to say it, like this is why I'm like critical key guys.

If you're walking around at the world's fair and there's 27 million of you walking around and half of you have pickle pins you don't think that you would stop somebody and be like and that was like the key of it yeah and what i love about this placement choice too is that like this would this would have been more effective than handing someone pamphlets because the minute you're handing it to someone they know it's a sale like they know it's a strategy yes if you find something on the ground that's essentially a golden ticket to win something free you're going to feel like you're getting away with one.

You're going to feel like I didn't earn this, but like I like sneaky got this. And I better take advantage of it because like it must be good if no one's handing them out. And we talked about this in several episodes where there have been specific marketing tactics on this psychology which is just like if it not meant for you and you just randomly get it you feel a lot more like you lucky right So you've got something that was just meant for you, even though it wasn't meant for you.

One of the last things I think I want to touch on here is the fact that it wasn't meant to go in your pocket. He was really smart and he put a hook on it. When they were actually giving his way, I guess, at the World's Fair, they had it pinned So you could actually just like use a, I don't know, like a safety pin or whatever and stick it on your shirt and wear it out of the building. And that was the only reason why it took off.

The numbers on this are absolutely crazy. So people climb these stairs to play in the surprise. So many of them were going up to get this rubber pickle that the police had to be called in to manage crowds that were trying to get this pickle. um the commotion was so bad that it got written up in the new york times as like a riot basically yes people were like get me free pr off of creative marketing placements that's what we love free freaking pr hines had given away one million pickle pins by the end of this and by the way pr when it probably meant a whole lot if you got written up in the newspaper then you were a big business like you're get ready you're about to become the next one i'm like especially yeah i mean like the new york times paper before they were the failing new york times uh like about the world's fair was probably like super bowl ad level yes like that super bowl i mean this was literally the epitome the epitome of just like getting everybody to talk about you an entire nation like you are the most interesting person in the world yep and the nice part is it had longevity as soon as they got it pinned it took it home now it's sitting somewhere in their house and also doing work well i was gonna say because of what a pickle is like it's a crunchy salty snack every time you see one you're gonna be like i could go for one of those right now and this is why i'm like oh it's the billboard that just keeps on selling oh heinz equals ketchup now we get we need to do another episode on how all of a sudden heinz went from something pickles yeah i do want to come back to that but first uh free consulting time for me i'm gonna take shooting doubles to the kentucky bourbon festival this fall well it's gonna be so good okay okay i want to do something like this what do i do okay do i drop a bunch of shit for free hats yes yes the booth or free whiskey to come by the booth that's probably what's your ultimate goal what are you optimized for uh awareness essentially impressions uh i want to get hats on people okay so you're going long term it's not like you want to sell out your booth that day okay no whatever it is i mean that'd be cool but like yeah see well and that's that's where we kind of need to like go it back into the story because heinz didn't expect that people were going to come buy pickles right that was not the point the point was i want people to know that i exist forever not just at this point so i'm down to like give away like 500 hats to be honest i don't know that i would give away hats okay it needs to be something small lightweight and odd we've done another episode on this i hope i can find all these episodes that i'm referencing do you remember that episode that we did on the fact that like sometimes odd or weird things that you couple with the brand makes you seem more cool right i remember and it should be dumb stuff it should be like chicken shoes or like i think we came up with like fortune cookies for a brand and like yeah fortune cookies go get your fortune cookies this is a fantastic way to get people to come as like figure out your fortune right like what's in it for you type of thing come get a fortune cookie because it's not supposed to be very valuable it's supposed to be interesting and fun and small so yeah go get those like whiskey themed fortune cookies i like that and everyone is just like i see seven shots of whiskey in your future which cookies are cheap to produce i can't imagine they're going to be very expensive for you to buy and if they're all whiskey themed people will come just because it's gamified that's the reason why they came over here is because it was gamified it was like i have a ticket i give it to you you give me something in return i like it now all i need is an army of kids to do my work for me and we'll be we'll be in business i mean if you got an army of kids that also by the way he definitely just used kids because they were cheap because they probably didn't pay them i'm assuming it's just like kids go out there So the last little bit of this that I want to talk about is something that I've been mulling over for a very long time, which is the fact that I think marketers think marketing is fishing when it is not.

Marketing is hunting. Hunting. Okay It not fishing It is hunting Okay By the way I learned you coming up with south carolina redneck i mean i was like nate um explain that to me because that super interesting because i don't know if i'd agree with that right off the bat oh i think we focus way too much on passive bait focused injections of cash okay in marketing this what this man did is not passive at all he specifically used bait yes however his goal was to get people to come to him not go to them and wait till they fight this is the reason why i'm like the fishing versus hunting thing yeah i'm like you're still using the same bait i was gonna say because we're allowed to hunt in south carolina so we plant a bunch of grass and throw apples and corn out there and then we sit in the tree and wait now depending on what state you're in somebody's gonna come at me and be like well you can't do You're not allowed to bake in our state.

Yeah, your state hates freedom. You get what I'm saying, though. Hunting is not passive. You're doing something.

When you fish, you stick a thing on the hook. You throw it out there. You hope to God for the best. Some days you get something, most days.

Yeah, you're going at the fish, hunting and waiting for the deer to come near you. I don't think we generate enough reasons for anyone to come near us. I think we actually do the opposite. Yeah, that's a bar.

every every piece of marketing we put out is like very hardcore coded as like hey we're coming after you like we are we are the chasers and we shouldn't be we should be the the no because i and this works everywhere in dating with your kids with your spouse like nobody wants to just like be constantly harassed to come do something for me yeah i mean at its core it's the difference between like selling and marketing oh thank you like fishing is selling fishing is like hey fish look we're here here's this lure check it out yeah marketing is like damn isn't this nice clearing in the forest full of apples and corn come on deer then you do it you though like if you want to come and hang out in our little field you can and the deer's like abso-frickin-lutely we are not doing the things that we should be doing we are optimizing constantly for a very passive like oh no i can't do anything about it it's no you're just boring i heard a great analogy the other day i was like if we pretended all e-com stores were like strip mall locations uh all of us are just focused on hiring the best sign twirler to stand out on the street instead of just building like a sick store instead of just building something where people come in and enjoy themselves and spend their money we're like what if we added an 11th sign twirler to send stand up front it's like oh it's probably not like right back to back to back on the same exact street that all of our competitors or it's like oh this guy can do cartwheels let's get him he's a better sign twirler it's like all right just build a dope store analogy i'm dying all this to be said people i mean and we'll probably do more episodes on how how you're supposed to do that i'm not trying to give you the whole how in this particular episode all i'm trying to say is like yeah we got to keep us coming back a freaking like rubbermaid like washer focused kind of silicone-ish pickle and told people i'm not even asking you to buy just come on in here you want a weird little pin pickle i got it and they were like yeah that's been pickle humans are real simple guys okay they don't need a whole lot of motivation to do things you're stumping your own creativity by optimizing for a passive sales focus ecosystem.

And I'm kind of done. Bang. Let's end it there, but let's do another episode on how you think Heinz is pickles. And I think it's ketchup because I think you are in the vast minority.

We will do a whole episode on how they migrated from the post to ketchup. And yeah, that's interesting too. Yeah. Thanks so much for listening to Brain Driven Brands.

If you want to work with either me or Sarah, hit us up on Twitter. Although I'll, spoiler alert, my clients are on your weight list of August now.