Brand recognition and brand love are two very different things. Rama - one of South Africa's most recognised food brands - already had the former. The Ramalicious campaign, which ran from March to June 2025, was built to earn the latter. TDMC partnered with 22 carefully selected food and lifestyle creators across TikTok and Instagram, briefing them not to sell a product, but to play with a concept: Ramanise your favourite dish, give it a new name, and make it unmistakably South African. Phase 1 generated 4,328,811 organic views with zero ad spend. Phase 2 delivered a further 1,364,682 organic views. Kantar research confirmed what the numbers were already suggesting - measurable uplift in awareness, consideration and brand relevance.
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Executive Summary
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Introduction
Rama has been a fixture in South African kitchens for decades. Getting people to buy it was never really the problem. The challenge was to make it a brand people actively talked about, referenced, and felt connected to - to move it from the back of the mind to the front of a conversation. That kind of cultural resonance can't be bought through standard media placements. It has to be earned through content that genuinely lands.
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The Challenge
Moving from recognition to relevance.
Rama's awareness was already strong, but awareness without active engagement doesn't build the kind of brand love that drives long-term loyalty and word-of-mouth.
Generating organic reach without relying on paid amplification.
The campaign needed creator content that could travel on its own - content audiences would engage with, share, and add to without a paid boost pushing it into their feeds.
Turning passive audiences into active participants.
Scrolling past a brand post is easy. The Ramalicious campaign needed to pull people out of passive consumption and into genuine participation with the brand's creative world.
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The Solution
Creators chosen for cultural fit, not just follower count
Twenty-two food and lifestyle creators were selected across TikTok and Instagram, with selection centred on authentic connection to local food culture and their respective audiences - not raw reach figures alone. Pairing creators who could drive scale with creators who delivered genuinely high engagement rates produced better combined outcomes than optimising for either dimension in isolation.
A brief built to invite play, not prescribe output
Creators were briefed around a single, strong concept - cook a real meal with Rama and give it a Ramanised name - and then given real creative freedom within it. That freedom is exactly what made the content land. Dishes like Ramazana Rice, Butterneitit and Ala-Rama Surf and Turf emerged from the creators' own kitchens, in their own voices, with their own humour. The tone was deliberately South African: familiar, playful and rooted in the kind of food culture that actually lives in people's homes.
Letting the language do the work
The Ramalicious lexicon gave audiences something genuinely useful: a shared vocabulary. Once that vocabulary existed, audiences didn't just consume it - they added to it. Comments filled up with viewers inventing their own dish names without any prompting, extending the campaign's reach organically with every interaction. The more locally rooted and specific the dish name, the stronger the audience response every time.
A layered ecosystem, not a single execution
Creator content didn't sit in isolation - it fed directly into the campaign's broader architecture. Paid media amplified the strongest organic content, while interactive elements like the AI chatbot and a branded TikTok AR filter gave audiences further ways to participate in the Ramalicious world, generating user content and data that fed back into the campaign in turn.
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Results
The creator strategy delivered both the scale and the cultural traction the campaign was built to achieve.
- 4,328,811 organic views in Phase 1 - with zero ad spend.
- 1,364,682 organic views in Phase 2, continuing the momentum built in the first phase.
- 3,728,299 total organic video views across the full creator pool.
- 1,357,195 total interactions across TikTok and Instagram.
- 970,000 views on the single strongest organic post.
- 18%+ engagement rate on the top-performing creator post - significantly above platform benchmarks.
- Kantar research confirmed measurable uplift in brand awareness, consideration and brand relevance - independent validation that the campaign moved the needle beyond views alone.
- The strongest content consistently shared two things: specific, locally resonant recipe concepts and genuine creative freedom in the execution.
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Conclusion
Ramalicious proved that when a brief is built around a strong cultural idea rather than a media plan, creators do what they do best - they make content that feels real, because it is. By selecting the right creators, giving them genuine creative latitude, and building a campaign concept with enough texture that audiences could add to it themselves, TDMC helped Rama earn something advertising rarely delivers on its own: a brand conversation that took on a life of its own, and kept growing after the campaign had moved on.
