The Ching’s Secret Facebook community is part of the larger aim at Ching’s to achieve word of mouth marketing. Ching’s has helped build communities around their brand offline, at colleges, schools, offices, kitty parties, housing societies. The idea was to extend this online. Ching’s Secret leverages YouTube, Twitter, Buzz and Facebook for the same. But Facebook is the fulcrum of their efforts.
Rahul Mehta, Business Head of Ching’s Secret, explained, “The goal is to create a 1-1 relationship with our customers. Secondary goal is to take ownership of the Chinese food category and instant noodles and soups category. Our competition stands for instant noodles for kids, while Ching’s is instant noodles connects with the youth and tech savvy folks in the language they best understand and at a place that is most relevant to them.”
“We have used a mix of content about food, Chinese, contests, giveaways, cookery recipes, and market research quizzes to build the connectivity and empathy with our fans. To drive traffic, we have used offline pushes, online advertising and the organic growth because of viral spread of content,” Mehta added.
Ajay Gupta, CMD, Capital Foods Ltd, brand owners of Ching’s Secret, Smith & Jones and Raji brands, added her, “The entire online project has helped give voice to our brand advocates. There are now 1 lakh people openly advocating using our products and endorsing us. There is immense knowledge that we have gained about our own products – how people use them, why, when and where. FMCG companies are normally separated from end consumers by 5-6 layers – super stockists, distributors, sub-distributors, retailers and media. Here, we have cut across and reached our consumers directly. We are using social media for crowd sourcing and to track what are the next flavours to launch. We are moving from a central control of our Ching’s brand to slowly transferring the ownership to end consumers. This is a fundamental and paradigm shift in marketing philosophy that will manifest in various ways. Social media is the catalyst in that.”
There are approximately five crore Indians online and one crore NRIs. Facebook alone now has 75 lakh Indians and 40 lakh NRIs. That is comparable to most national newspapers. Also, over the next 3-4 years, this is only going to rise massively. The return on investment on social media is way better than traditional media. Facebook is the best place to reach Sec A+, A and B+.
Ching’s Secret is a popular Chinese ingredient brand launched in 1996. Its focus is to bring real and tasty Chinese food to the Indian audience. It helps Indian consumers make their favourite Chinese dishes at home. Available as pouring sauces, stir-fry sauces, hakka noodles, soups and now instant noodles. Ching’s Secret is brought to market by Capital Foods Ltd.