Results and Effectiveness

During the campaign, there were even customers who visited IKEA just to meet the members of the Task Force and their activities created a friendly and fun image for IKEA store staff. The number of customers who visited IKEA stores increased by 25% and the number of visitors to IKEA's website increased by 20%. Their activities were covered by 11 TV programs, 8 major newspapers/ magazines, and 720,000 articles on the internet.

Creative Execution

Under the campaign theme, 'work out your storage issues,' IKEA formed a team of selected members called the 'Storage Task Force.' The members of the 'Storage Task Force' were actual home furnishing experts working at IKEA. They visited Japanese homes, to see storage issues and then introduced clean-up ideas through dance and music in an easy and fun way, even for kids. They were able to solve consumer's problems by offering their professional experience for storage solutions. At the store, IKEA offered clean-up exercise lessons for kids and held a store event for them to participate in. While having direct conversations with the customers at the store, the team also appeared in different media to promote IKEA's storage solutions: IKEA blogs to introduce themselves, on TV programs as storage experts, and on YouTube to share their exercise song & dance. Together, it created extensive word of mouth on and offline.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

IKEA wanted to communicate their expertise and unique ideas on home furnishing, especially for home storage issues. According to a survey conducted by IKEA, 80% of all Japanese were concerned about their home storage issues and each home had different issues; some did not have enough space, some had things piled everywhere, and others had over crowded closets. However, people just didn't know where to start or how to cope with these problems. At IKEA, because of their self-serve shopping system, customers had little opportunity to talk with IKEA sales staff, which is well-educated to give needed customer support. IKEA saw an opportunity to utilize the IKEA store staff as a way to communicate its home furnishing knowledge and create more opportunities for the store staff and customers to interact, and to bring more energy to the store.