When a brand doesn’t need to introduce itself

McDonald’s and Heinz illustrate two different ways of reaching the same destination: existing in people’s minds without having to ask for it.

The recognisability that proves itself

There is a fundamental difference between a brand that communicates its identity and one that demonstrates it. The first relies on signs, symbols, and recognisable visual assets; the second can afford to remove them because the identity already exists in people’s memory, layered there over time.

McDonald’s New Zealand belongs to the second category and made it explicit with the “You Know Where” campaign, stripping everything from their billboards: no golden arches, no burger imagery, no visuals engineered to catch the eye. Just the names of their products, printed on a red background, with no further indication. And everyone knows who’s behind it.

It may look like a creative exercise. In reality, it is a positioning statement, a public demonstration that the brand lives in people’s minds independently of its own symbols.

The paradox of subtraction

The dominant tendency in contemporary advertising is the opposite of subtraction: more visual elements, more stimuli, more information compressed into the shrinking seconds of available attention.

What McCann New Zealand produced instead is a form of communication available only to a brand so deeply embedded in the cultural imagination that it no longer needs to introduce itself.

When a brand becomes a prototype

There is, however, a level beyond mere recognisability: becoming the categorical reference point. Not one of the well-known brands in a category, but the category itself in people’s minds.

Heinz got there and in 2022 found an unusual way to prove it. A Canadian agency fed Dall-E image prompts containing the word “ketchup” paired with the most unlikely contexts imaginable. Every time, the result was a red bottle bearing the Heinz label. The AI, trained on billions of human-generated images, had internalised the same equation people carry in their heads: ketchup is Heinz.

The power of this campaign lies in the source of the proof. Heinz is not claiming to be the definitive ketchup, a machine is saying so. A system with no commercial interests, simply returning what it has absorbed from global visual culture.

This is what it means to be a category prototype. Not the best-selling brand, not the most advertised, but the one people automatically conjure when they think of a product. It is a position earned through decades of consistency: same product, same colour, same bottle shape.

Time as a strategic variable

McDonald’s and Heinz illuminate two shades of the same phenomenon. The first demonstrated it can communicate without its own symbols; the second has become the symbol of its own category. Different paths, both built on years of coherent work that transformed repeated presence into automatic memory.

This is the most underestimated variable in brand building. It generates no creative awards, tells poorly in presentations, and produces no measurable short-term results, yet it is the only force that creates the kind of recognisability these two cases have made visible. For everyone else, the work is still ahead.