The Campaign

The creative idea was ‘A taste of home’. It combined a launch film and a series of mobile engagements. The 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 start a conversation among professional chefs 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.

Creative Execution

The film 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. Knorr’s 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 big data capability allowed for precision targeting of 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 film was released on mobile in We Chat Moments and aimed only at professional chefs. For the mobile engagements Tencent data was used to identify the home province of individual chefs and then targeted them with content that related directly to the local dishes famous in their home province.

92% of chefs clicked on the video. 73% of chefs liked the video in social and over one third of the views of the video came from social sharing. 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 gross ROI of 69:1 and an incremental ROI of 13:1. (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. Chefs don’t watch primetime TV, because that’s when they are at work, but they do take their mobile into the workplace. Whenever you see a chef in China on a break he’ll have a cigarette in one hand and his phone in the other. Mobile was core platform for Knorr’s campaign. The launch film told the chef’s story in a powerful, but honest way. The role of the film was to open a conversation with chefs and get them sharing the Knorr campaign. 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