Unilever Group is a company merged by Margarine Unie from the Netherlands and Lever Brothers soap company from UK in 1929. The headquarters of Unilever are located in Rotterdam, the Netherlands and London, respectively responsible for operations of food and washing supplies. UFS is Unilever's specialised business line of condiments and tea products for restaurants and other users in the professional catering industry.
Unilever was founded in1929, by the merger of the Dutch margarine producer Margarine Unie and the British soap supplier Lever Brothers. Unilever has chosen the Dutch city of Rotterdam as the location of its corporate headquarters, ending nearly a century of residency in London. UFS (Unilever Food Solution), as Unilever’s catering brand, offers catering supplies such as ingredients, recipes and tea products. UFS also provides clients with catering service and solutions, to inspire clients to greater success in the catering business. Social Touch designed a campaign of “Chef Festival” for UFS, to connect chefs and brands in a much more engaging way
The Challenge
UFS delivers food solutions to restaurants in China, together with other FMCS brands such as Knorr, Hellmann’s and Lipton. The challenge was how to reach their key target audience: chefs.
However, UFS faced a lot of difficulties in promoting its brands in the Chinese market, such as its inefficiency in reaching chef communities and the lack of understanding of the customer structure and preferences
The Solution
Social Touch proposed social media marketing strategy for UFS. Users were attracted to UFS’ WeChat account from multiple channels, including offline events, in-store sales and packaging with QR code. We then created different campaigns to deliver customized contents to different groups of WeChat users (followers). Based on member lifecycle and the labelling system, the users were grouped for personalized communication to enhance member activity engagement level
Social Touch launched "lobster cooking" event and processed trainee selection on Weibo. While applying for the event, the applicants needed to write down six key questions or challenges, enabling Social Touch to conduct further studies on chefs’ concerns
We launched a new packaging with a pin code for prize redemption. Through extensive exposure on social media and offline event, we attracted a lot of chefs to redeem awards, thus to enhance customer loyalty. Meanwhile, collected information from chefs’ interactions helped us build better consumer profiles
We launched a live streaming event inviting Da Dong, a food influencer in China to attract high-end chefs. Marketing automation tools such as MOT and Trigger template were used to increase the event awareness
We conducted a sales promotion in Guangzhou to promote the new arrival, KCP products. Through mobile interaction, users won coupons through online events and redeemed rewards in offline stores. The physical store sales were thus then increased
Through social media monitoring, we identified and motivated high-net-worth users through reward incentives, to encourage them to introduce UFS to more high-net-worth users