Insight
One word can drive a brand. Knorr in Poland needed to move from being seen as an international brand to being local. Knorr wanted to be the culinary experts of Poland. Its biggest competitor Winiary (Nestle) has been around for many years and has massive local heritage. How could Knorr change this in the future?
PHD knew that for years women in Poland, more than anywhere, share and make friends through recipes and proof of this is that the largest circulating magazine for the last 10 years has been a recipe sharing magazine (Send a Recipe). How could Knorr bring this trend into the digital age and be the owner of this global, but also very Polish habit. PHD needed to lay the foundations for Knorr to be the recipe owner of Poland.
Strategy
Maurice Saatchi once said “great brands stand for one word.” Google now owns the word search. What word did Knorr want to own? Sometimes in markets in early development, opportunities arise that would be unthinkable in more developed countries.
Sometime by going back to the very basics you uncover something that is transformational. When you ask the very basic childlike questions, you get the best solutions. There is lots of hyperbole on digital communication, but communication is the same as it ever was. Consumers are the same, it’s just that new media has changed the way they communicate.
PHD unearthed that 16 years ago - some very forward thinking young marketing executive had bought the domain name for recipe.pl (przepisy.pl). Luck maybe, but maybe not. PHD reinvented the whole internet platform around the word recipe.
This domain name meant that Knorr could own that space in the ever growing digital space forever. Not only that, but up to two years ago local content was minimal. In fact digital was like a hotel TV, there were lots on but nothing in your own language. Knorr had the chance not only to own the most important domain name, but teach people to cook with its products. Knorr could become the experts… Knorr could become to recipes in Poland what Google is to search.
Execution
The new domain based on recipes was created, with a whole ecosystem built around it (FB, YT, mobile app, mobile page) – all around the word “recipe”. Content production began in parallel – recipe creation step by step and video recipes, basing the choice of recipes on historical searches in Google. When a housewife searched, she went straight to content featuring a Knorr chef. In a country where most food content was from abroad, Knorr owned the new cooking space online.
With Google’s help PHD created a sophisticated and complex search campaign. Google itself even said that this was the best Unilever search campaign in the world. Bolognese, lasagna, bigos and pierogi meant Knorr online. The idea is simple yes, obvious yes, perhaps too obvious, but totally transformational. The simplest ideas are often the best.
Results
Knorr have created one of the biggest food portals in Poland and closed the gap to the competition in terms of local image and trustworthiness. The average time spent on site in 2012 was 7min 34 sec. – proving very high engagement with the site’s content. Over 335,000 fans on Facebook compared to Winiary’s 226,000 fans. The campaign has over 250k downloads of its mobile app, making it one of the top loaded applications in Poland.