The Campaign

The creative idea was ‘A taste of home’. The campaign encompassed a launch film and a series of mobile engagements designed to be shared socially. The launch film told the story of a chef who was unable to get home to be with his family at CNY. It spoke honestly about the sacrifices that chefs make to put food on the table for the celebrations that everyone else enjoys. The purpose of the film was to build the community of professional chefs in social and let them know that Knorr respected their sacrifice and supported them in their professional life. The mobile engagements then allowed chefs to connect with home in a series of culturally relevant, social interactions that droves sales.

Creative Execution

The launch video told the story of a chef working in a kitchen at CNY. In the film he grabs a moment to contact his family who are having their CNY banquet together, but without him. Our hero shares his love and regrets about being away from his family and then gets back to the hardest shift of the year, preparing banquets for everyone else. Tencent’s data product enabled Knorr to precisely target chefs, using 6 different data pools, such as people that had applied for catering roles online or people that followed chefs and restaurants on We Chat. The launch video was released on We Chat Moments and targeted only professional chefs. For the social engagements Tencent’s data team was able to identify the home province of individual chefs so that they could be targeted with content that related directly to the local dishes famous in their home province.

The Knorr community of chefs on We Chat grew by 20% to over 1 million people. 92% of chefs clicked on the launch video. 73% of chefs liked the video in social and over one third of the views of the video came from social sharing within the chef’s community. The engagement rate for the video was 4 times higher than the average of other Unilever campaigns running at the same time. The video was seen 35,847,222 times in total. Participation rates in the mobile engagements were 50%, which was 3.2 times higher than the previous year. Overall campaign interaction was 50% higher than the previous year, sales grew 21% year on year and the campaign generated tens of millions of euro in sales with a high ROI return. (Source : Unilever and Unilever’s media agency)

The vast majority of chefs in China are migrant workers. Everyone else travels home at CNY to be with their family, but chefs remain at work preparing food for everyone else. Social mobile as the perfect place to reach chefs. Chefs don’t watch peak time TV, but whenever you see a chef in China on a break he’ll have a cigarette in one hand and his phone in the other. The campaign only ran on mobile. The launch video told the chef’s story in a powerful, but honest way. The role of the video was to open a conversation with chefs and connect them to the Knorr community. After the video a series of 6 different mobile engagements got chefs interacting with the Knorr brand and sharing relevant content with their friends and family in social in the period running up to CNY. These