Events, Seasonal and Short-Term
Situation Analysis: For the past 38 years, the Ikea catalogue has landed once a year on the doorsteps of Canadians, marking the launch of new product ranges and solidifying Ikea’s style point of view for the 12 months ahead. However, due to the deluge of promotional items delivered to the home, plus the ubiquity of online home furnishing ideas, anticipation of its arrival had dwindled. Ikea, facing an unremarkable market performance – down by 1% from 2012 – needed to generate excitement about the launch of its new catalogue in fall 2013.
Insight & Strategy: Changing home décor, planned or unplanned, happens throughout the year, creating a year-round need for inspiration and solutions to trigger store visitation and purchase. But inspiration is omnipresent. The constant crop of new ideas, opinions and tips in all media forms delivers a stream of inspiring ways to design, furnish and refresh the home, making people feel overwhelmed and unsure of how to pull any of it together.
This led to the insight that the Ikea catalogue is not simply a catalogue of products; it is a change management tool. The Ikea catalogue needed to be positioned as the source of inspiration to help make the most of life at home, showing that Ikea understood people’s unique relationships in and around the home.
Execution: To move people from feeling intrigued about Ikea to feeling excited about furnishing with the new catalogue, the campaign featured real-life home decor situations, highlighting solutions to common pain points that would compel people to turn to Ikea as the brand that truly understood how to make the process of home décor easy and affordable.
The campaign ran through most of August 2013, utilizing six 15-second television spots (with some television content integration), commuter newspapers, large format OOH, digital and social. Recognizing that marking pages of the Ikea catalogue with sticky notes is a universal consumer behaviour, the creative idea took this behaviour and iconic visual, and created stories around it, summed up with the simple thought: “There’s a page for that.” An ambient display board was made out of real sticky notes and was in two high-profile OOH locations, allowing people to take away free pads of sticky notes to mark their new catalogue.
Results: Sales and visitor goals during the promotional period were both exceeded by 3%. During the four weeks of Aug. 12 to Sept. 8, 2013, Ikea saw 5.5% in growth versus market growth of 1.5%. Visits to Ikea.ca were up 7% versus the prior year, with Canada’s traffic the third highest for Ikea globally during this period. In addition, there were 170,000 downloads of the Ikea catalogue app (iOS + Android).
Cause & Effect: There was no increase in spending or activity in Ikea’s advertising efforts compared to the previous year, no increased promotional efforts or extraordinary new product news. The timing of advertising of the Ikea catalogue launch remained the same versus the previous year.
Credits:
Client: Ikea Canada
Deputy marketing manager: Hilary Lloyd
External marketing manager: Kirsten Ryan
Advertising specialist: Jonelle Ricketts
Agency: Leo Burnett
CCO: Judy John
SVP/CD: Lisa Greenberg
Group creative heads: David Federico, Morgan Kurchak
Group CD/AD: Anthony Chelvanathan
Group CD/CW: Steve Persico
AD: Chris Brown
CW: Britt Wilen
SVP general manager: David Kennedy
Group account director: Natasha Dagenais
Account supervisor: Allison Tang
Account executive: Rebecca Simon
Strategic planner: Dustin Rideout
Social media planner: Heather Morrison
Print producers: Anne Peck, David Eades
Digital producer: Thomas Degez
Broadcast producer: Julie Caniglia
Media agency: Jungle Media
VP connection planning: Brooke Leland
