Background

Situation: Covid-19 hit the world like a ton of bricks and food businesses bore the full brunt of the storm. A lot of establishments couldn’t survive and went under. Others barely survived, but with reduced sales things were not looking bright. Brief: The brief was to build equity for Shan Kitchen by establishing it as a brand that supports local businesses during these tough times Objectives: 1. To build brand equity in the current moment 2. To embed purpose in Shan Kitchen communication 3. Drive Shan Kitchen awareness and TOM around the country

Describe the strategy

Business challenge: Due to the lockdown, organizing on-ground promotional activities and leveraging offline mediums became nearly impossible. The challenge was to come up with a campaign that integrates offline and online mediums seamlessly. Brand value: Shan Kitchen is a platform that facilitates communication and discussion. It aims to promote the movement of individuals towards their culinary goals. Target market: Primary Target Audience: Home Cooks, Housewives Secondary Target Audience: General Audiences

Describe the execution

Implementation: Based on the insight, Shan Kitchen partnered up with Pakistan biggest food delivery app “FoodPanda” to empower home based chefs in these trying times. Timeline: 1) First phase: To screen out the most capable Home Chefs. Four food influencers and judges were taken on board to evaluate over 300 Chefs from Karachi, Lahore & Islamabad based on the following criteria: Originality, creativity, texture, color, cooking technique and Flavor 2) Second phase: - The chefs who scored 3.5 or above out of 5 were selected. Their profiles on FoodPanda were endorsed by putting up a Shan Kitchen Recommended Badge on their profile pictures. - To get maximum reach and persuade consumers to try out these chefs, we launched a Dvc and a series of pre-rolls across social media. - A PR plan was also deployed. We took celebrities and influencers to push these chefs subtly on social media

List the results

Only after a month of the campaign launch, we saw results coming in: The Chefs with Shan Kitchen Recommended Badge saw a growth of 167% on average The sales in Karachi increased by 186%, Lahore by 140% and Islamabad by 188% The number of new home chefs joining FoodPanda app increased by 35%

Please tell us how disruption in your market place inspired the work

With the new normal we also saw new trends in the food business. The big players started pushing online deliveries and take-aways through their communication. Almost all communications centered around following SOPs and providing consumers healthy food. But through research we found out that the small players: Home based chefs and local businesses are really struggling since they don’t posses the funds to spend on marketing like major restaurants. This in turn effected their revenue generation making it extremely testing to keep themselves afloat.