Verint Community

Thermomix: a multilingual community for Vorwerk's brand ambassadors, and its app

4 Roads built Thermomix's multilingual Verint community in 2018, then its app: 99% of the community's active members registered and downloaded it.

4 Roads has been with us on a long journey, developing products new to our company. However, they never lost the drive and motivation to push the project further and make sure we have great results. I'm very grateful for having an opportunity to work with such an agency – because reliable partners are hard to find.

Zuzana LatanikovaGlobal Community Manager, Thermomix

The brief

Bring Thermomix's brand ambassadors into a community of its own.

Thermomix, made by Vorwerk, is a multicooker that blends, whips, chops, kneads, steams, sautés and cooks, with over 80,000 guided recipes that sync to its screen.

With a fan base of over 10 million, the product created something few brands manage: brand ambassadors of its own making. Many of Thermomix's micro-influencers were superfans who had built their own audiences, and careers, around cooking with it; one ran a Facebook group of 40,000 people. Reach them, and Thermomix would reach their followers too.

So Thermomix set up Community Stars, to give these superfans the tools, the messages and the assurance to go on as ambassadors for the product. It was never sponsored or paid.

Client: Thermomix, by Vorwerk
Services: Strategy, design and development
Platform: Verint Community
Timeframe: six months

The control panel and dial of a Thermomix.

On Facebook

Invite-only Facebook groups, and no data to go on.

Without the budget for a platform of its own at first, Thermomix launched Community Stars as invite-only Facebook groups, and soon ran into Facebook's limits. Community Stars was kept small and exclusive on purpose, and Facebook gave no analytics for a group below a certain size, and very little above it.

For a data-driven company like Thermomix, that was a problem. It had to pay someone to scroll through the groups post by post, collecting what data they could, and without hard data the Community Stars team could not make the case for bringing members into other work, such as product testing.

The groups ran on the recipes their superfans shared, yet members had to send their ideas to Thermomix by email, outside the group. And Vorwerk saw that, with the ambassadors spread across other people's platforms, its customers were getting a fragmented experience of the brand. Thermomix decided to move to a community platform of its own.

The community

A multilingual community, built in 2018.

Thermomix reviewed the platforms on the market, found that Verint Community ticked the most boxes, and gave the project to 4 Roads, a Verint partner. 4 Roads built the Thermomix Community on it in 2018.

Thermomix valued Verint Community's features ready out of the box, its deeper analytics, and that it is built to be extended, so the brand could make experiences as distinctive as itself: its galleries, for example, became recipe challenges.

Thermomix also weighed how easy the platform is for community managers, not only members. Zuzana Latanikova, Thermomix's Global Community Manager, could train them in a two-hour session, after which they were comfortable changing the pages.

What decided it was language. Many other community platforms were based in the US and limited to English. On Verint Community each country could have its own group, in its own language, on one platform and for one licence fee. Italy and Portugal went first, and the community went on to run in English, German, Italian, Polish and Portuguese.

"We can see by miles the advantages of using Verint Community over staying on Facebook. We needed to find a middle road between building it ourselves from scratch and buying it out-the-box, and for value and what it offers us, Verint Community has by far been the best deal," said Zuzana Latanikova.

Friends cooking together around a Thermomix in a home kitchen.

Community Stars

Putting the brand ambassadors in the spotlight.

The Community Stars platform, built with Thermomix's brand ambassadors, showed them and what they had made to the whole community, alongside the discussions that sparked other members' ideas.

As with anything new, members took a little time to find their way. Recipe creators gained visibility and promotion from the brand, but the biggest reason members stayed and took part was a direct line to the brand they love, and it gave Thermomix a way to reach the superfans' followers.

Engagement was high: over a year, across all its groups, the community counted 7,000 content views and 1,300 pieces of content created, and 90% of members were active.

"If you look at the numbers from the Italian Community, the level of engagement is just crazy. It's crazy how one small community can generate these metrics," said Zuzana Latanikova.

Screens from the Thermomix Community Stars platform.

The app

The community in the kitchen, and on the go.

Thermomix then wanted an app its customers could use on the go and beside the machine, and 4 Roads launched one on Android and iOS in 2020. It could not be a separate product: the community was already thriving, and members had to want to use it. So it was designed as part of the community, with the tools and features the brand ambassadors already relied on.

Push notifications and offline access brought members back more often: the easier a community is to reach, the more people take part.

Within six months of launch, 99% of the community's original active members had registered and downloaded the app on at least one device.

Sketches and phone screens from the design of the Thermomix community app.

Results

Six months on: more members, more often, reading and contributing more.

Thermomix understood its customers better for it, and the community went on growing.

Viewed content: up 92.1%
Interactions: up 10.1%
Unique contributors: up 8.49%
Active content: up 7.34%
Unique viewers: up 6.82%
Active users: up 3.85%
Unique engagers: up 3.15%
Sessions: 8.83 a week per device

A tablet showing a chart of activity over time.

What it became

From a community to a full platform.

The plan was to close every Facebook group and, with Community Stars recognised across the wider company, to connect it with other parts of the business. Having seen Italy's success, countries outside the original plan wanted communities of their own, and other brands asked Thermomix for the roadmap of how it had done it.

The project went on to become a fully fledged platform for Thermomix, which ran until 2025.

99% of active members downloaded the app, 92.1% more content viewed and 8.83 weekly sessions per device

Measured over the six months after the app's launch.

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