Chinese New Year, is the most important festival of the year in China. Everybody dines out with their family and friends. Everyone is celebrating, except chefs. Chefs are the ones in the kitchen, alone, preparing food for millions of other families to enjoy.

In China Knorr targets professional chefs. Knorr’s 2016 Chinese New Year (CNY) campaign triggered an overwhelming response from chefs in China, generating many tens of millions of euro in sales with a high ROI return.

Knorr’s mobile only campaign asked chefs to respond by sharing their data along with PINcodes from any of 20 different Knorr SKUs to take part in a series of mobile engagements. Chefs responded to and shared the campaign at record levels beating all Unilever and industry benchmarks.

Knorr is a B2B brand in China that only targets professional chefs. Knorr used film in the Chinese social platform We Chat to target professional chefs in China. The precision of the targeting allowed Knorr to tell a story that was highly relevant to professional chefs and their friends and family in the run up to Chinese New Year (CNY) 2016.

The film was shared at unprecedented levels by chefs, because it spoke to them directly. It launched a social campaign that engaged chefs all over China and generated millions of euro of sales with an ROI of 69:1.

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 Knorr to precisely target 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 launch film was released on We Chat Moments and targeted only professional chefs.

For the mobile engagements Tencent data allowed Knorr 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.