All images and videos courtesy of Mother London.Since IKEA first made its debut in the United Kingdom in 1987, the retailer has become a mainstay for furniture and home furnishings. However, in 2013, sales growth and penetration had declined, and the company was challenged to turn the downward trend around.
IKEA teamed up with agency partner, Mother London, to develop a communications strategy that would help revitalize the brand. IKEA’s vision globally is “to create a better everyday life for the many people.” Building on this idea, the team introduced “The Wonderful Everyday,” a celebration of life’s everyday moments and the ways that IKEA can enhance them. Whimsical creative work drew attention to things that might usually be overlooked, like the simple joy of well-designed storage. The campaign ran on a variety of channels, primarily focusing on TV and social media, including Facebook and Instagram.
The effort ultimately exceeded sales objectives. IKEA and Mother London’s “The Wonderful Everyday” earned two Gold trophies at the 2017 Nagrody Effie w Wielkiej Brytanii Gala, where IKEA was also named Brand of the Year.
Zapytaliśmy Kieran Bradshaw, Strategy Director Na Mother London, to share his perspective on the Effie-winning work. Read on to learn the biggest challenge his team faced in bringing their idea to life, and what Bradshaw learned about brand purpose along the way.
Tell us a bit about your Effie-winning effort, “The Wonderful Everyday.” What were your objectives?
KB: Ultimately we had two core challenges; change the fortunes of the business (turn around declining sales growth/revenue/penetration) and give the brand a renewed sense of meaning, not just for consumers but also for co-workers and stakeholders alike.
What was your big idea? What was the insight that led to it, and how did you arrive at that insight?
KB: Our idea was to celebrate that IKEA exists to improve the everyday; this was really a benefit-led expression of the brand’s core purpose that was attuned to both the needs of consumers and the contemporary cultural dynamics.
How did you bring the idea to life?
KB: Our creative platform was simply an elevation of our strategic idea; Life isn’t about fleeting events or a summer holiday, it’s the little, everyday things that make it what it is: The Wonderful Everyday. To show how wonderful IKEA believes the everyday really is, we created a brand new world of hyperbolic, surreal and cinematic renditions of life at home that demonstrated insight, yet brought more to people’s lives than simply holding up a mirror to everyday life.
What was your biggest challenge in bringing your idea to life? How were you able to overcome that challenge?
KB: With 10,000 SKUs across 21 categories and 24 million potential households to target, our biggest challenge was focus. Knowing how broadly distributed potential purchase occasions were for different product categories, we could never really be relevant to all at once.
To address this, we created a model of communicating a product category, but through the lens of the brand — a more elevated approach that stood a better chance of illustrating a more universally relevant point of view; this enabled us to deliver a return in the highlighted category, but more broadly, a halo across the whole business.
What is the biggest learning you’ve taken away from this effort?
KB: Every brand has an interesting starting point, whether it be a truth, a point of view or a purpose. By using this as an anchoring point it’s possible to create a brand platform that can endure whatever challenge lies ahead. Although much of the industry’s narrative around brand purpose has been rightly critical — in some instances campaigns have perhaps overstepped the mark towards navel-gazing — when it is done with a respect for culture and with a consumer benefit in mind, it can be a real galvanizing force for the organization, both inside and out.
Is there anything else we should know about “The Wonderful Everyday?”
KB: Working on IKEA has changed how we think about our own homes and the impact they have on our everyday. By considering the notion of effectiveness in relation to our own environment, it’s surprising to see how we can apply furniture and home furnishings to deliver an effect that improves our daily lives, whether it be a hook that helps children get ready for school in mornings that saves time and drama, or storage that helps you organize your clothes and gives you back five minutes extra in bed.
