Key takeaways:
- Ikea focuses on customer–centric content marketing to understand its audience better.
- They also focus on drawing their audience’s attention by using different approaches like Freebies and Guerrilla marketing.
- Ikea came up with unique ideas like AugmentedReality, Virtual Reality, hotplate, and marketing their catalogue like a digital book.
- Ikea always tries to stay relevant and talk of the town, it recently came up with capsules that have mattresses, comforter, pillows, and blinds in them, that will take people around Paris while they take a nap in them.
Ikea is a multinational furniture company that designs and sells ready to assemble furniture. Its biggest competitors are Walmart, Bed Bath and Beyond, and Amazon. Ikea’s slogan is ‘creating a better everyday life for the many people’, and with this, in mind, Ikea is coming up with various creative ideas to showcase their product. The Swedish furniture retailer has focused on customer-centric content marketing, recently Ikea has launched napping capsules that take people around Paris while they are they nap in them. It is towed with an electric bicycle and has a mattress, pillows, comforter, and blinds in it, this was done for unique brand activation in Paris.
In this digital culture where the customers go through minimum 100 adds per day depending on where they live, so the ads must be relevant and unique so that it catches the audience’s attention and they remember it, so using customer-centric marketing techniques is important. Keeping this in mind Ikea comes up with very unique, creative, and customer-centric marketing ideas and campaigns to grab the attention of the audience, read more about it here:
Let’s see how Ikea managed to become one of the most renowned pieces of furniture worldwide by their creative and unique customer-centric marketing. Ikea’s modern Marketing approach has ranged from witty Facebook content to emoji marketing and YouTube tutorials.
In the Digital Age Ikea came up with the good old book advertisement:
In 2015 Ikea came up with this very creative idea keeping in mind its customer-centric marketing and introduced their 2015 catalogue like a digital book, introducing and showing its features like a digital book and referring to it as a book. Due to its sarcastic tone and light-hearted approach the advertisement went viral and was widely appreciated. With the growth of digitization, the advertisement also skilfully talks about how print is not dead yet. Ikea reassured its faith in the good old Ikea printed catalogue. This advertisement shows the features like a digital book i.e., it’s always fully charged, need no cable, no lag in loading the page, you can not only see the product but can touch and feel the screen in real-time, it also talks about how the book is screen touch and one can swipe from right to left to move forward and from left to right to move backward, it talks about features like easy to put bookmark, easy to move around and directly go to the desired page. The results were so good the video went viral and there were 12million YouTube views, showing how Ikea understands its customer and focus on customer-centric marketing to grab the attention of its audience.
IKEA’s Take on Augmented Reality:
Ikea is not scared to play around and experiment with technology and as a matter of fact, Ikea is probably the first furniture retailer to adopt augmented reality to help their customer and make it easier for them to choose the product according to the area of the house. It was noticed that around 14 percent of the customers end up buying the wrong size furniture and help their customer with this Ikea came up with the Ikea catalogue app feature in 2013 known as ‘Place in your room’ which allowed the customer to see their room space with the selected furniture in it, the app also provided a 360-degree view of the space so that the customer could avoid taking wrong size furniture and help them in making the right purchasing decision. This made it easier for the customers to find out the best matching product and also showed how Ikea thinks about its customer and focuses on a customer-centric marketing approach.
Ikea is selling a hotplate that needs your phone for all the beautiful reasons:
Getting your telephone far from the food table is a seriously impressive accomplishment in this world of web-based media and needless food photography. Ikea Taiwan came up with the most innovative idea to keep all the distractions away from the table and focus only on food and spend some quality time with people.
Lounge around the hotplate and food arrives at the table. While it holds a pot loaded up with stock, meats, and vegetables, the hotplate will not turn on until a cell phone is set under. One cell phone won’t give sufficient warmth to prepare the food, so more cell phones should be added to make a big difference for the hotplate. This unique idea was developed keeping in mind how with our busy schedules and self-centric lifestyle we sometimes forget to connect, with this cool innovation people can spend some quality time at dinner with their family and friends talking to each other rather than playing on their phones.
The hotplate is an example of hyper-localized campaigns, Ikea surely knows how to connect with its customers in the highly fragmented market and highly segmented customer group by leveraging a localized approach. The Ikea UK marketing will be different from Ikea Singapore which will be different from the American. Ikea faced countless hiccups when they introduced its global product in India and China but as a true marketer, they learned from their mistakes quickly and they localized their marketing strategies, they came up with the twist in their campaign which made them more relatable.
IKEA’s Freebies Approach:
Freebie is something that is given without charge may be a ticket or sample. Brands use this approach to launch their product when the brand is unknown or new to the market. When the customers use your product and they like it then they use it more so freebie is used for attracting the prospective customers or to get the attention of the customers, Afterall who doesn’t like free stuff!!
Ikea came up with their ‘Moving Day’ marketing stunt in Quebec which caught the passer-by’s attention. In this the passer-by gets free moving boxes with moving tips, checklists printed on them, and not only that there were dinner offers for people who are yet to set up their kitchens.
This approach was very successful as the store traffic increased by 14 percent from the same weekend the previous year and the sales increased to a quarter compared to the previous year.
IKEA’s Guerrilla Marketing Approach:
Guerrilla Marketing is an advertising strategy that focuses on low-cost unconventional marketing tactics to yield maximum results. Guerrilla marketing is ideal for small businesses to reach out to a large audience without spending a huge amount. The Guerrilla Marketing approach is also used by various big companies in grassroots campaigns to complement their mass media campaigns.
Ikea France used Guerrilla marketing, to celebrate its 30th anniversary it installed a vertical outdoor apartment billboard which turned to a climbing wall. This was a very innovative yet less costly approach that caught the passer-by’s eyes and increased the store traffic as people wanted to try and climb the vertical outdoor apartment billboard.
Ikea’s Video Marketing:
Ikea’s YouTube videos appeal to a large amount of audience. To keep their audience engaged and interested they come up with unique ideas like their famous DIY videos posted by them as well as their customers and fans. The video content is of a wide variety, from useful videos like ‘How to’ to funny videos on how to assemble Ikea furniture when drunk where drunk people try to assemble their furniture which is called ‘Dead drunk but trying’. Their videos also have comedians walking around in an Ikea store, there’s a lot of content made by users with Ikea products on YouTube. Their different content makes it relevant to a wide range of audiences and customers tend to buy products that they relate to. Whether it is their emotional ads or humorous ones Ikea tries to keep their audience interested and relevant to them.
Ikea’s YouTube channel is a good example of how brands use different types of content to meet its customer’s intent by using STDC that is See Think Do Care framework, which focuses on getting relevant content according to the user’s preference, it also helps in understanding how to communicate your audience in this digital era.
- SEE: In this Stage, the marketer tries to reach a wide amount of audience. Ikea creates a lot of high-quality inspirational videos to make their audience attracted towards their product, arousing their needs.
- THINK: This is the stage where the marketer’s goal is to make people think to buy a product like theirs. Ikea makes a lot of advice and tips for makeovers of offices, homes, outdoor areas, sitting areas, etc. They also talk about everyday problems faced by people which can be solved by their products making their customers consider getting a similar product.
- DO: In this stage, the goal is that people consider or are in process of buying the product. Ikea makes videos helping customers to reach their websites for an online purchasing experience.
- CARE: In this stage, the goal is to make their customers repeat their purchase from the same brand at least twice. Ikea’s videos on product manual and how to assemble their products and advice videos on the products make the customers think that they care about them making them consider repurchasing from them.
So, in the above paragraphs we talked about Ikea’s best marketing campaigns but how do they come up with these magnificent strategies and achieve their goal? To achieve the goal and keep it original, unique and, relevant Ikea uses many strategies like making good use of its social media pages, it is really important for a brand to know its target audience and which platforms are being used by them and Ikea does it well be it their promotions or discounts or sale season or the new product launch they make sure that their customers are aware of it. This makes them valuable, reachable, and imperative in the eyes of the audience.
- We have already talked about Ikea’s Augmented reality approach, apart that Ikea also uses Virtual Reality technology, we see the use of VR for games and entertainment purposes but Ikea has come up with their unique customer VR experience making it unforgettable for them. Using the VR technology, the customers can not only see the area virtually with the products before buying it but can also use it i.e., the customer can see their kitchen before buying it can even cook there. This kind of experience makes it memorable for the customers and also helps to gain their loyalty.
- Ikea also tries to keep their website updated, fresh and new, this not only makes good user experience on the website but also helps in holding the audience for longer on their website as customers get to see new things, they don’t feel it’s repeating and hence keeps them busy. They also use events promotions to keep their customer’s interests alive.
- Ikea’s content marketing is also one of the very good examples of how to keep their customers engaged, Ikea’s home tour videos are very famous on Pinterest along with their inspirational videos giving rise to their content marketing. Their strategies also show how important it is to know your customers and Ikea does it by interacting with their customers on social media sites but it’s not all, they take their customer’s insight and feedback to improve as much as possible. One of the examples of Ikea’s insightful campaign is a campaign where they asked their customers to tell their morning routine and how it affects and impacts their whole day, they also provide expert advice and tips to their customers around this campaign.
- Ikea has utilized its 300-by-251-pixel banner to showcase their two thousand eight hundred products where normally a brand uses a maximum of five products in a banner box. In a single banner users can see 2800 Ikea products which are very small but once you move your mouse the image gets magnified, the products are easily visible and it also gives the link to directly buy that particular product. Ikea’s strategy to showcase so many products in a small area also gives the message to the customers that their product is easily accommodable and even if they have a small living area Ikea got them covered, to know and learn more about such content follow [Link: https://www.instagram.com/p/CK34DoVHPL5/?utm_medium=copy_link]
Astha Kumari
Content writer
Nikunj Solanki
Graphic designer
Neeraj Chiplunkar
Editor
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