Malaysian Media Awards Winners Showcase

The Challenge
Anchor has established itself as chefs’ preferred dairy brand globally, but it is still relatively new and a challenger brand in Malaysia. Long established local competitors dominate the market, and are priced lower. The challenge for Anchor is to build awareness and differentiation by positioning itself as “chefs’ preferred choice”.

The Solution – Insight & Idea
Moms take pride in cooking for her family. She wants to treat her family with delicious food made from good quality, tasty and trusted ingredients. However, she often struggles to continuously find a variety of simple, yet creative recipes using quality ingredients. Analysis shows that cooking TV programmes is a main source of recipe information for moms, and these TV programmes indirectly become trusted sources of authority for when she selects her ingredients and its brands when she shops. Given the small budget, Anchor’s strategy was to leverage on an existing, well-known TV cooking show to gain brand and product visibility. MasterChef Malaysia, Astro Ria’s Top 10 programme, was the perfect fit for Anchor to connect with moms. By owning MasterChef, Anchor would be able to build awareness amongst its huge existing fan base. Furthermore, Anchor would be seen as an approved brand by the chefs, thereby delivering the message of it being “chefs’ preferred choice”. To afford sponsoring MasterChef, we negotiated to use Anchor products as part of the investment contribution to reduce direct cash injection. Additionally, this also meant that Anchor products would be used by the contestants on the show, giving Anchor further visibility and endorsement.

The Execution
To drive the association as the chefs’ preferred choice, we negotiated for Anchor products to be visibly used as part of the ingredients in the MasterChef Pantry. An Anchor branded chiller was also featured in the MasterChef Kitchen. Both had incidental shots featured on TV. Additionally, Anchor had its showcase in the “Mystery Box” creativity challenge, being the primary ingredient that the contestants had to work with to create their unique dishes. This showcase not only gave Anchor massive airtime exposure during the programme, but it also demonstrated Anchor’s product versatility as the main ingredient to a variety of delicious dishes! All the above integration was captured in a 30sec creative vignette that was aired throughout Astro Ria. This gave Anchor additional airtime exposure that spread the awareness further as it reached out to more moms, further strengthening Anchor’s ‘chefs’ preferred status’ in the market and driving differentiation for moms to reconsider their current choice of brand before the point of conversion.

The Results
Despite a very limited budget of RM85k, Anchor was able to reach more than 2.36million urban moms and 675k MasterChef Facebook fans through the program. This means a low cost per reach of only RM0.04, generating a strong ROI of 16.7X! Average monthly sales increased +9% vs. pre-sponsorship period. Anchor was able to utilize MasterChef as a springboard to deliver its “chefs’ preferred brand” message and own it as a differentiating point in the market.