•Data insights

An online survey we conducted amongst 12000 Millennials in 12 markets revealed two data insights sizzling with creative opportunity:

Insight1- 69% of consumers believe that their flavour preferences are linked to their personality

Insight2- 78% of consumers say they would be more attracted to someone who likes similar flavours

• Innovation

Bringing to life insight 1: Allowing people to discover their flavour personality

We worked with IBM Watson to help turn flavour and recipe data into a unique, datadriven online tool consumers could use to determine their individual flavour personality.

Bringing to life insight 2: Matching people by their flavour personality

This allowed us to conduct a social experiment in which we asked 70 real life singles to take this flavour personality test. We coupled up those with a flavour personality match of more than 95% and sent them on an unusually intimate first date over the food they loved - to see whether sparks would fly.

• Originality

No one had previously applied science to explore people’s flavour preferences and define distinct flavour types. And despite Millennials’ obsession with food, even the big dating platforms had not used flavour preferences as an element within their matchmaking algorithms.

We input pages of information from existing literature on flavour science into supercomputer Watson. Utilising Advanced Relationship Inference technology, Watson distilled down this complexity, clustering information into 12 flavour types. Our (human) creatives looked at these flavour profiles, giving them characteristic names and personality profiles, from Meaty Warrior to Gracious Grazer.

We then entered thousands of Knorr recipes into Watson, who dissected them by their molecular flavour elements, matching the recipes to each of the flavour types it had identified.

Watson’s unique, interconnected structure of flavour personalities, foods and recipes led to an interactive online tool that could determine flavour personality from just a few questions about their food preferences; complete with a prediction of the recipes each flavour personality would love - as well as a suggestion of which Knorr products would help cook them.

Once we were able to profile people by their flavour personality, a whole new world of storytelling opened up. While our competitors had to rely on the worn out physical taste shots, we were able to enter the emotional territory of dating.

The more people used the profiler, the more intuitive it became, matching flavours that even the most experimental diner hadn’t tried.

Data enhanced consumer experience

• 1.27 Million Clickthroughs to the Flavour profiler from our video (3 x the average CTR)

• 90% of people who clicked on the profiler finished the quiz and received their Flavour personality profile, including recipes they would love and product recommendations to help cook them

Data driven behaviour change

• 1.6 Billion FREE impressions gained from sharing, commenting, liking our campaign & media reports about this novel idea (1.1 billion impressions above KPI)

• People got so excited about cooking with Knorr that we experienced a +15% uplift in Millennials intending to purchase our cooking products (vs. KPI of +1%)

Business impact

• Knorr’s brand equity received a boost, with Brand Appeal rising +10% amongst Millennials (vs. +1% previous year).

• Global market share rose 2.4% (in our 8 campaign markets Nielsen measures)

‘Love at first taste’ combined data and creativity in an unprecedented and beautiful way. The outstanding success of our campaign would not have been possible without either the data or the creativity. Both were interweaving, with data providing the insights for the creative idea and the scientific basis for the flavour profiler, which in turn made our ‘matchmaking by flavour’ experiment possible. Our campaign is a great showcase of creative agencies and technology companies working together to create more meaningful, personalised experiences and exciting storytelling for consumers. And it helped a traditional brand connect with a discerning, hard-to-engage, foodie generation.

• Gathering

-Desk research into Millennial foodies’ behaviours and preconceptions

-Online consumer survey gathering data around basic hypotheses

-Literature on flavour science and recipes provided unstructured data for Watson to devour

• Interpretation

Our research into Millennials’ behaviours and attitudes showed that to this generation, food is social currency. More than 60% of them use food in their social media updates about themselves – whether that’s checking into restaurants, commenting on a cool new pop-up or instagramming their meals.

But there was a limit to what these kind of food posts could express about them.

We set out to create a more expressive social currency for foodies.

That’s why we didn’t stop once we had fed in our data and constructed the online flavour profiler. To really boost our content’s social currency, we used our data-driven tool to conduct an experiment that we hoped would lead to highly intriguing and emotional storytelling that would engage our audience.

• Targeting

As a category-first, we are now in the unique position that we can target people by their flavour personality, serving them more relevant, personalized content fitting their flavour personality. A competitive edge in a category flooded with ‘one-size-fits-all’ food content.

•Situation

Millennials weren’t cooking – as one of the world’s largest cooking brands, that was a problem for us. Especially as Millennials were about to outnumber our current buyer group, older cooks, in 2020.

The 18-35 year olds’ ways of eating, buying food ready-made, were already starting to gnaw at our cooking products’ share within the food category. More and more of Millennials’ food spend was going towards convenient, ready-made food from delivery services, restaurants, and streetfood markets. If we wanted Knorr cooking products to stay relevant in a future dominated by Millennials, we had to get this generation to start cooking themselves.

• Brief

Get Millennials excited about cooking – using Knorr to do so

•Objectives

Create a highly talkable campaign (KPI: 500 Million free impressions)

Grow Brand Appeal and Purchase intent amongst Millennials (KPI: above +1% achieved in previous year’s campaign)

Maintain or grow global market share (>+0.1%)