On November 30th, 2022 UNESCO added the French Baguette to its list of Intangible List of Cultural Heritage. When hearing the news, we knew it would be a perfect social reactive opportunity for Kraft Dinner. As the most popular grocery item in Canada, Kraft Dinner has definitely reached cultural significance. So the Kraft Dinner brand team knew we could make a pretty strong case for adding Kraft Dinner to the illustrious list and earn some engagement. We also knew that we could use UNESCO’s snub to our advantage and remind Canadians just how important KD is in their lives. If successful, it would prove to be a clever, simple and zero cost way for Kraft Dinner to cement its status as Canada’s unofficial official national dish.
KD’s biggest fans spend a lot of time on Facebook and IG, so we knew we had to create something that would work on those platforms. We wrote a formal, but funny letter to UNESCO where we made our case. We also made a point of mentioning other Canadian foods in the letter, so fans would have something to debate in the comments rather than simply agree. The reaction from our followers on Instagram and Facebook was immediate. But we were ready. Our social media team was on hand to reply to comments in real time. We then created subsequent posts to cement KD’s cultural significance. We also sent UNESCO a KD care package, which we made sure to film and post to our Tiktok. Our biggest challenge was keeping the momentum alive after the initial post, but we made sure our UNESCO content was fun and feisty, so our followers remained and engaged and invested.
Success for KD’s bid for UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage status was noticeable from the get-go - the level of engagement and love for the posts was noticeable right out of the gate - people didn’t just like the post, they felt compelled to write comments. Translated into actual numbers, KD UNESCO posts exceeded the average KD engagement rate by 160% and average engagement per post rose by 411% which translates into 5.1X more engagement per post than our average KD content. It was so successful that one of our followers continues to tag UNESCO on all our posts to this very day. We could not be happier!
