Abstract:

Monochromatic is a concept defined in different ways in the literature. Monochromatic is a single color on the color wheel (Ambrose & Harris, 2013, pp. 19-20), one of the certain color combinations such as analog, complementary, triadic (Hornung, 2012, p. 30). According to Çağlarca (2018, p. 96), monochromatic harmony (tone-on-tone) is the harmony created by using the light and dark tones of the dominant color as a garnish, without mixing one color with another. Briefly, monochromatic refers to a single color on the color wheel and its shades from the lightest to the darkest. In design, monochromatic expresses versatility and balance. It creates a bold, dramatic look while looking soft and elegant. Monochromatic creates a strong sense of composition and uniformity, keeps visual interest alive, and draws attention to content, creativity, not the colors themselves (Manandhar, 2018; Kaushik, 2021; Uzunay, 2022). Monochromatic in marketing (Smith, 2015), on the other hand, means that the advertising design gains a minimalistic structure that prevents distraction and makes the message and “Call-to-Action” stand out. Monochromatic gives the brand a sophisticated and professional yet simple look. Focusing on a single color also strengthens the brand association. Monochromatic advertisements can be defined as advertisements including only one color from the color wheel, apart from visually neutral colors such as black, white and gray or in which different tones of the same color are seen together. In this study, monochromatic advertisements of Heinz ketchup and tomato sauce are discussed. It is aimed to understand whether the use of monochromatic color scheme in advertising has become a value expression for the brand over time and how monochromatic shapes the presentation of the brand in a visual sense. This article also focuses on showing monochromatic combined with the changing qualities of the product, brand, and consumer over time and the basic, established rules in design. In this study firstly, Heinz's advertising campaign "Heinz: Tomato, Slices, Seeds" is analyzed in terms of semiotics. "Heinz: Tomato, Slices, Seeds" campaign consists of three print advertisements. The intense red background surrounding the focal object (the slices of tomatoes, the bottom of the bottle or the ketchup package) helps to create a kind of "halo effect" in all three posters (Hutching, 2017, pp. 157-168). As a provocative, exciting, striking, appetizing color that creates a sense of superiority, red dominates these advertisements, engulfs the viewers’ gaze and forces them to look at these focal objects. This gives Heinz an image that is both bold, strong, orderly and uniformly, but also soft, elegant and versatile. Secondly, the brand's advertisements published between 1998 and 2022 were accessed through two websites, Adsoftheworld and Adeevee, offering advertisement archives, and the Internet archive of Rethink advertising agency working for the brand. As a result, a total of 51 Heinz ketchup and tomato sauce advertising campaigns, 11 from Adsoftheworld site, 31 from Adeevee site, and 9 from Rethink advertising agency site, were selected as the sample. Content analysis and semiotic analysis were carried out on this sample. Heinz's effort to present the consumer with images emphasizing the same red tones for many years can be defined as transforming the color experience from the individual to the universal and ensuring that Heinz red is matched with ketchup or tomato sauce in the collective unconscious. Heinz has been influenced by social, political, economic, cultural change, color trends and new perspectives in marketing. Heinz, who used white and red in a very minimalist style in the early 2000s, switches to a red that is more lively, more intense in line with the changes in the preferences of the new generation and that shows a kind of power by taking up the entire surface in the advertisements. The different tones of Heinz red in advertisements symbolize both the uniformness of mass and the difference of individuality within this mass in the 2010s. Simultaneously, Heinz develops the design language in its advertisements and brings together tomato, bottle and ketchup figures, which it has mostly positioned separately in the past, under the same roof, Heinz red color. The influence of the Leo Burnett advertising agency in the creation of this powerful, dramatic red embodied in a minimalist style is undoubted. In short, it can be stated that Heinz monochromatic advertisements, by making use of color memory and color constancy (Holtzschue, 2011, pp. 54-55) aimed to make the consumer think of the tomato red while looking at ketchup or tomato sauce, to code the different tones of red in the advertisement as a single red in their mind, and to look at every new Heinz campaign with this red that they had in their memory which has been formed in their minds from the past to the present.

Keywords: