My speculative story of Heinz and the Rise of the Ketchup Industry

My mind was wandering a little this evening. Tangential to another throught, my brain somehow had a notion, an idea, a revelation...about ketchup. I'll present my thoughts, chronolocially as I wrote them down, over 3 different periods of time.


---------------12:57am - Ketchup, wow, where did you come from?

Ketch-up seems like such a low-key, small-market product. It's so disposable to us since it's pretty much free wherever we go as a condiment. Rarely - since the bottles are huge - do we have to go to the grocery store and buy a new bottle. When we do have to go, eventually, it's dirt cheap at the store.
In reality, ketchup is a huge business that kind of crept its way into the economic community as it crept its way contagiously into the culture of America. Advertisements...the heinz image and symbol (57 varieties) and the vintage coolness of it...the trendy burger joint of the 50s; somehow Heinz and it's foreign, novel, salty tomato product crept itself into our homes and onto our plates. It infiltrated our culture. Ketchup just is the staple of American foods. One day someone thought of mashing up some tomatoes - probably because they were looking for a way to utilize the rotton and bruised tomat-ahs that they couldn't sell - knowing that in order to be successful, they were going to have to market it in some special way. For, in order for ketchup to be profitable, it must be spread somehow by connectors. People who were the connectors of multiple social circles, the individuals who initially spread out messages successfully and ultimately create the trends, or epidemics in our nation, enjoyed ketchup and thought their friends would too. And so they told their friends, or their friends perceived them as being trendy because of this novel product they owned and used as flavoring on their food. Yes, we're talking about ketchup. So innocent sounding. So disposable. Something you see on the ground once a day and have no interest in picking it up whatsoever. But, everyday the Multi-Billion dollar Ketchup industry is somehow pulling in massive profits by essentially squashing bruised, unsellable tomatoes and bottling them. The people like it on many foods. After all, it can be used on chicken, fish, beef, pork, sandwiches, salads, marinate your london broil...
Ketchup holds such a large portion of our economic influence that if it were somehow to go bankrupt, it would send a disruptive wave through the economy that would drastically send some industries into the red and others drastically into the black. Ketchup. Snuck its way into our hearts, homes and hamburgers.



------1:17am Targeting Connectors as a Marketing strategy and Lettin' 'em do the Work


Marketing strategy. Some Psychological Basis. Companies intentionally try to market to, in some inconceivable way that remains hypothetical at the moment, the connectors of mainy social circles. Those who are somehow higher up in the social "food-chain." No, not in a parasitic or paternalistic way; simply, individuals who, when messages hit them, and they choose to spread them around in a communicable way, do so in the most efficient manner. They accomplish this inevitably, since they are, mathematically connected to the most people. They are, metaphorically, at the top of a pyramid scheme - again not to mean any criticism to them as being part of a "scheme." (Although scheme is really a psychological word that explores the notion that a person develops certain schema based on their perceptions of the world that are continually shaped and modified through the accomodation and assimilation of one's environment. Hence, one's scheme is not negative nor positive; instead, it simply is one's perception of the world, which is obviously not negative nor positive, but completely neutral. In conclusion, scheme should not have a negative connotation, but somehow, over time, our language - or our perceptions of language - assimilated and accomodated to the ever-changing language and culture. Slang, dialect, accents are all so damn contagious that we assimilate them almost involuntarily with our own speech. Ah yes... )

I digress...

Back to the matter at hand. The theory, or shall I say hypothesis, to overstate the unstudied state of my notion, is that the successful companies somehow market themselves through televison and magazines and films and buses and the internet, in such a way that successfully reaches the connectors, who then do the work for the companies: spreading the message that their product is trendy and worth buying.



---------2:04am A Follow-up

45 minutes later...

I microwave some 5 hour-old "chicken" nuggets and "french" fries.

I proceed to patiently indulge in succesively tearing, squeezing, and licking 14 packets of heinz ketchup. I notice, as I'm eating, what a ketchup-glutton I am. I can barely taste the food because I'm drowning it in so much ketchup. For foods like "chicken" nuggets with ketchup, the appeal is not about how the "chicken" tastes, because you can't taste it through the pungent ketchup; instead what is appealing about the nugget is the fried taste and the texture and consistentcy of some spongy processed meat, which supposedly resembles the consistency of an actual piece of meat...and that big glob of ketchup on top, of course.



----3:21am Goodbye.

Ketchup is no longer interesting to me.