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. Insights from social informed the design of mobile engagements that allowed chefs to connect with home in a series of culturally relevant, social interactions that droves sales.

Creative Execution

The Knorr data pool comprised individual user data from six sources:- 1. Customer data in the Knorr DMP 2. Retargeting participants in previous campaigns (Knorr DMP) 3. Relevant interest group participants in QQ (Tencent social) 4. People that had searched relevant terms on Soguo (Tencent search) 5. Members of the Knorr community on We Chat (Tencent messaging) 6. Other We Chat users tagged with chef interest labels (Tencent messaging) Tencent aggregated these 6 groups into one pool of target data and then removed duplicates to give one unified pool of 48 million people to target. Having identified the total pool of target chefs, data from Tencent allowed Knorr to go deeper and identify which province was home for our chefs. This was crucial, because it tied mobile experience and social content back to specific dishes that are famous in different provinces in China.

Precision targeting through data for Knorr powered a campaign that was uniquely relevant for chefs. As a result of that relevance chefs embraced and shared the campaign at unprecedented levels. 1. Video clicks were at 91.7% (36% better than the We Chat average). 2. Reposts were 25.5% (350% better than the We Chat average). 3. Campaign engagement was 21.3% (390% better than the Unilever We Chat average). 4. Participation rates in the mobile engagements were 50% (3.2 times higher than the previous year). 5. The Knorr community of chefs on We Chat grew by 20% to over 1 million people. 6. 24,000 new chefs were added to the Knorr DMP for retargeting. 7. Sales grew 21% year on year. 8. Gross ROI was 69:1. 9. Incremental ROI was 13:1. 10. Knorr generated many tens of millions of euro in sales value. (Source : Unilever and Unilever’s media agency)

The strategy was grounded in data from first principles and build a virtuous circle for data and insight. Knorr has a data management platform (DMP) that houses information on hundreds of thousands of chefs in China. Insights from data in the DMP informed creative direction, media strategy and social strategy. The engagements that were built for social linked to PINcodes on 20 different CNY themed Knorr SKUs. When chefs took part in the CNY promotions they supplied personal data that went back into powering the Knorr DMP for future targeting. Tencent were able to analyse individual user data across all of their platforms to build and activate a qualified and unduplicated database of chefs who were Tencent users for media targeting and social campaigns.