Chefman · Customer story

How Chefman Turned Untagged UGC Into a Creator Growth Engine

Plot helped Chefman uncover the 54% of brand mentions happening without a tag—and turn authentic product users into organic and paid creator partners.

“We're not tagged in the post, we aren't verbally mentioned, but it's able to grab our logo or we're a split frame of a two minute video that we would have never seen. That's the stuff that's sometimes the most valuable.”

Kyle Plescia · Director of Marketing at Chefman & CHEF iQ

Chefman just unlocked a powerful new marketing tactic — gifting products from Chefman’s new product lines to macro-creators that are authentically using their legacy products in social posts. Chefman is America's number one electric kettle brand, with 500+ products, multiple design awards, and shelf space at major retailers (Target, Amazon, Costco). Chefman also produces Chef IQ, a tech-forward counterpart product line with 3 distinct “smart” appliances. Chefman’s marketing team is focused on efficient growth and is testing out new tactics all the time. The team’s latest unlock came from a very clever, targeted gifting tactic, enabled by Plot.

The Background

Creators are sharing content of them cooking with Chefman and ChefIQ products every day, but aren’t tagging Chefman or Chef IQ directly. Chefman runs into the same problem as most brands - the most authentic mentions aren’t explicitly tagged by content creators. Enter: Plot.

How they use it

Chefman came to Plot looking to better capture those untagged mentions, and found that they consistently were missing ~50% of their mentions because creators were simply using the product, not actually tagging the brand. With this new information, Chefman identified some huge creators that were already superfans of Chefman, and likely great targets for gifting opportunities. Within weeks of gifting, those creators generated new content and thousands of impressions for the brand and for Chefman products that are newly purchasable.

Noah Perlo (@noahperlofit) has millions of followers on socials. Noah was consistently using an old Chefman air fryer in his healthy recipe content but wasn’t tagging the @chefman handles! The Chefman team captured Noah’s untagged mention posts through Plot and decided to gift him their new air fryer + other new products from the Chefman line. Noah immediately started posting with the new products across tons of additional videos, generating millions of additional views!

Miss. Mendoza @profe_noriii_mm, a high school teacher with 150K+ followers on socials was using Chefman appliances in her classroom but never tagging the brand… The Chefman team found her untagged content via Plot and sent over a few items from their new product suite. She went on to use those appliances to build out a full cooking curriculum, theme days for slushies, pancakes… and documented the whole thing on Instagram.

teacher using Chefman appliances in her classroom example

The Results

For authentic brand users, gestures like this go a long way — And for Chefman, they’ve now turned this sourcing → gifting process into a repeatable marketing motion that’s generating tons of impressions and engagement. They’ve also doubled down and invested in these creators as brand partners, expanding into paid partnerships, affiliate opportunities, and content campaigns over time. The gifts that keeps on giving.

Find the signals your customers are already sharing.

Schedule a demo