The core of UFS’s business is Chinese chefs who work and own small or medium restaurants. Previously the easiest way to find and engage with them was to have an extensive national sales force to visit these chefs face to face. However, this limited our ability to assist and have more frequent interactions when they needed it the most. We wanted to leverage the burgeoning digital ecosystem, in particular social media (WeChat), to create a community where chefs can find recipe inspirations, share tips and seek help from UFS’s professional food consultants.

Our solution was to decipher and identify unique browsing traits and interest points specific to the chefs, within the enormous amount of social conversation data and browsing behavior available on digital and social platforms.

We partnered with Tencent to utilize data via :

- QQ’s chef communities

- WeChat’s audience tags on those who followed B2B catering accounts

- Sogou’s search behavior data on related search terms

By triangulating these data through agency trading desk we were able to programmatically serve ads to only these people identified.

Display ads were only served on WeChat and QQ to keep them within the social cycle. This then led to HTML 5 creative that uses game mechanics to educate Knorr’s benefits & led to sampling message.

With different tags of each groups, we were able to identify different interest points to serve with different HTML 5 games.

To expand our audience pool, existing verified chef data was utilised to create look-a-like cookie. Also, Unilever were able to add these people to their leads database, and the cookie pool for future targeting of UFS campaigns was replenished.

By incorporating and analyzing the chefs’ digital behavioral data, we were able to truly become an essential part of Chinese chefs’ business. It allowed us to precisely communicate with chefs almost on a one to one basis within mass channels such as WeChat (650 Million monthly active users) and QQ (850 Million monthly active users). The precision of the on-target rate for WeChat followers and product samples delivered was a perfect 100%; a phenomenal result as the industry benchmark is typically 30% for any programmatic targeted campaigns in China.

UFS expanded their geographic penetration to chefs in 20 new cities in China compared to the existing 32 cities that the on-ground sales teams already cover.

All of this decreased the cost per interaction down by 62.5% (FMCG industry benchmark).

This is now adopted as an always-on strategy to continue the conversation with chefs for UFS.