The Challenge
Cris-Sal was Ecuador’s leading salt brand in a category where people don’t think twice about what they buy. Salt is chosen out of habit, easily replaced by cheaper alternatives, making leadership fragile and hard to defend over time. To stay relevant, the brand needed visibility people would actually remember. In Ecuador, that kind of attention lives in sport. But there was a problem. In Latin America, salt is widely associated with bad luck. And in sport, where superstition shapes behavior, anything that could “jinx” performance is avoided. This meant Cris-Sal was effectively locked out of the one space that builds relevance at scale.
The Solution
Instead of trying to overcome that barrier, we used it. If salt was believed to bring bad luck, then it shouldn’t be on Ecuador’s side, but on the opponent’s. That idea became The Power of Salado, a platform that gave the brand a consistent role in sport without sponsorship. Across different executions, Cris-Sal redirected superstition toward Ecuador’s rivals: supporting opposing teams before matches, removing a well-known “salado” journalist from coverage, and praising rival athletes before key competitions. Each action responded to a different moment, but all followed the same rule: shift the bad luck away from Ecuador. By behaving within the culture of sport, instead of advertising around it, Cris-Sal found a way to be part of the game on its own terms.
