Case Study: Lee Kum Kee Tastes Good Feels Good Campaign
by Clare Cassidy
Lee Kum Kee’s Tastes Good Feels Good campaign, was an ambitious project that would position Lee Kum Kee as the first Chinese food brand to actively promote healthy eating. The campaign would feature traditional and unconventional Asian recipes that would deliver on taste, nutrition, calories and a feel-good factor. It would also feature tiny cartoon chefs helping to cook and eat the food, which really appealed to our sense of the absurd here at Curious Crab. Marketing for food companies in London doesn’t often entail animated characters (although we think it should. Add tiny cartoon chefs to all your recipe videos people!) so we jumped at the opportunity to work on this innovative campaign.
Recipes were key to the campaign’s success. Our team set to work brainstorming and testing, under the watchful eye of a nutritionist. It was interesting to see how some traditional dishes could be tweaked to create healthier versions without losing their essential flavour. For example, a pineapple fried rice was given a veggie update by losing the chicken chunks and replacing the rice with cauli-rice. A traditional char siu roast was transformed into roasted butternut char siu slices.
Many iterations later and we had our winning formula, eight light, colourful and healthy recipes for health-conscious consumers. Our next job was to find a look and feel that would embody that feeling of health and vitality. A succession of storyboards were created in painstaking detail. Every shot had to be carefully thought out to accommodate the cute little characters who would be ‘cooking’ our recipes. We had little chefs riding oyster sauce bottles onto screen, adding ingredients to pots and jumping out of woks! Now working with food can be a challenge, it usually takes a ridiculous amount of shots before the pineapple falls at exactly the right angle, or the sauce pours out the bottle in a beautiful cascade rather than a succession of erratic gloops. Throw in a very energetic cartoon chef and you have a challenge on your hands.
The shoot itself required meticulous prep work. Not only were we framing for square and portrait videos, but we also had to consider the animation and bring out the best in every ingredient. We spent an inordinate amount of time agonising over the way noodles were wrapped around a chopstick, or the exact position of a leaf of pak choi on a plate. And just when we got it right somebody would chime in with “but what about the little chef!”
It was indeed a challenge, but the team at Curious Crab certainly rose to the occasion and the final videos were a great success. Eight fun, punchy videos that really stand out on the grid and truly embody that feel good factor. Check out our little chef here, we’re very proud of him. Who knows what the future holds for this little fella, perhaps a short film or Netflix series… We can only dream.