A most delicious irony

In the A-hed article today -- a lighthearted piece that always starts on the bottom of the first page -- the Journal tells us about how the city of Pittsburgh is up in arms about how its football stadium is going from being named from a local legacy product (Heinz Ketsup) to an out-of-state company nobody has heard of (Acrisure -- an online insurance broker). All around Pittsburgh everyone is talking about how they bleed Heinz.

The irony is thick here, as thick as... But the biggest irony has to do with Kraft Heinz's missteps on branding. Astute readers will recall that Warren Buffett teamed up with Brazilian private equity firm 3G to acquire a controlling stake in Kraft Heinz back in 2013. A large part of 3G's playbook is cost-cutting, and it specifically focused -- at least back then -- on a strategy called zero-based budgeting (ZBB), which forced all corporate managers to build budgets from zero each year, as opposed to starting where they were the year before (so, assuming a $10 million baseline for IT, say, and then negotiating from there). This is a great way to cut costs, for sure. But it also cuts other things.

By 2019 it became clear that Kraft Heinz had underinvested in its brands and was losing market share to competitors -- not really a smart strategy in an age when most corporate value is in non-physical assets (people, brands and other intellectual property). Thankfully, Kraft Heinz has righted its ship to a certain extent in the interim, or it has at least stanched the bleeding.

Of course, all brands crave visibility, and there's nothing like an article on the front page of one of the nation's most respected newspapers to give you free publicity. The same goes for Acrisure. I had never heard of them, now I have. The entrepreneurial population tells us that all publicity is good publicity. It's really not a stretch at all to see Acrisure ceding the naming rights to the stadium back to Heinz in a year or so and getting a big goodwill bump, having raised its profile considerably for very little money. It would be like a planned New Coke event.