Brand Spotlight: IKEA

Things have changed around here - we're going to do things a little differently with Brand Spotlight from now on. We'll be looking into how brand communicates itself to its customers and how they do it so effectively, sound good?
So without further ado, for our first brand we'll be looking at those kings of home furnishing IKEA.

With 345 stores across the planet, IKEA was one of the first brands to embrace the digital age. Making maximum use of social media and also shifting people away from catalogues to it's digital version with ever increasing apps for both Android and iOS made people sit up and take note on how to market a worldwide business.

According to figures, the IKEA catalogue app has been downloaded over 10 million times making it current and fresh to modern shoppers. Especially when you bring augmented reality into the picture.

Social Media

Facebook: The USA page has the highest following measuring about 3,411,985. The retailer's social teams pose questions, links to photo albums, and post YouTube clips to increase engagement.

Twitter: IKEA has separate twitter feeds for all its country-specific twitter pages. The US page alone has 2, 22,000 followers while IKEA Canada page has 6, 66,000 followers. Ikea makes these pages engaging by tempting its followers to indulge in campaigns such as celebrating 'Bring your Own Friends Day (BYOF).

Pinterest: This is an obvious choice for a retailer which deals in home furnishings, as this claims to be the official 'visual discovery tool'. Making best use of Pinterest, IKEA visually presents its merchandise to local markets in the UK, USA, Canada and other countries.

Google +: IKEA's USA page entered Google + only recently (January, 2014) and has the lowest following out of all of its pages. The retailer has apparently not been able to make much use of this platform even though the main page was launched in December 2011.

Outdoor campaigns

While promotion of its catalogue through online mode constitutes almost 70 percent of its annual marketing spend, IKEA creates highly engaging outdoor campaigns.

Indoor Garden: IKEA took to the indoor environments of Waterloo and Liverpool rail stations in the London, to show to commuters that they could 'make more of their outdoor spaces' - a.k.a their gardens. A pop-up shop invited commuters to sit down and observe the wide range of outdoor solutions available in the IKEA store that could help them transform their outdoor space.

Billboard-fitted wardrobes, Vienna: IKEA advertised the advantages of its particular flexible wardrobe by "dressing" a billboard with a PAX door that passers-by could slide open in order to discover IKEA's solutions that help fit anything into a wardrobe.

IKEA has really pushed the boundaries in what a furniture retailer should be. It is more about just selling furniture, showing how it helps benefit your life is something IKEA strives towards and by using all these channels, it presents itself as current, cool and at the forefront of it's market. What IKEA will do next, I don't know but I'm excited to find out.

James xo