IKEA’s Data-Driven Campaign Reintroduces the Brand to U.S. Consumers

The furniture and home furnishings company launches a new campaign to reinforce its value and overcome brand misconceptions.

Have you ever had a situation where you have a great brand story to tell but everyone thinks they already know it? That was IKEA’s (Ikea’s) challenge.

The brand has been in the U.S. for more than 30 years. And despite having only 42 locations nationwide, there is a surprisingly high awareness of the name. But while the brand has rich furniture and home furnishings for people in every life stage, Ikea was having trouble penetrating into existing and new markets—mainly because most people associate Ikea with “starting out” or college furniture.

We needed a way to overcome this “false familiarity” Americans have with the Ikea brand. Many people think they know us, but they don’t really understand the offer. Our mission is to improve the everyday lives of people by providing quality, stylish, sustainable home solutions at affordable prices. We want more Americans to understand how and why Ikea can do this and how we can make everyday life at home accessible and achievable for everyone. To communicate this brand value, we launched the “We Help You Make It” campaign.

We started creating the campaign where we usually do at Ikea—by talking to our consumers. We worked with Mindswarms to conduct “at home” qualitative research. We asked people to video themselves in their own homes and to answer a series of questions, including what are some of their challenges with their home, what is their dream home project, and what do they love or value about the Ikea brand?

From that beginning, we worked with Ogilvy to determine how we could align our brand mission to the things in society that people really care about right now. We were looking for a cultural tension that would make sense to most people. During our campaign research, we uncovered a lot of news stories, surveys, and other data that supported the idea that life at home still hadn’t returned to normal since the 2008 recession. In fact, it became apparent that people were living a new normal—one where it was harder to “make it” than ever before.

This is where we found a place for our brand mission and our objective to enable people to live that better everyday life at home.