Images provided courtesy of IKEA Russia.In 2016, IKEA Russia needed to differentiate itself from a growing competitive set, and its reputation was declining among consumers. Sales suffered.
In response, the brand partnered with Moscow-based agency Instinct to shift its reputation from “sterile and uniform” to “inspiring and versatile.” Together they launched “Living Books,” an imaginative campaign showing the joy of home décor through the re-creation of beloved storybook homes.
After exceeding its KPIs across the board, the campaign went on to earn Gold and Silver at the 2018 Effie Awards Russia competition, in the “Single Involvement” and “Home Goods” categories, respectively.
We asked Anna Fokina, Marketing Communications Manager at IKEA Russia, to share the story behind “Living Books.”
Tell us a bit about your Effie-winning effort, “Living Books.” What were the business challenges you faced? What were your objectives for this effort?
AF: Our vision is to create a better everyday life at home for many people, and IKEA has a lot of products and solutions of different styles to fit different homes.
However, over the years we have noticed a certain shift of people’s perception of the IKEA brand in the Russian market. They were thinking that they knew us (“IKEA products are mostly wooden and white”), which is in reality just a part of our range.
Our challenge was to help people reconsider our offerings and see that IKEA has a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products fitting any need and wallet. In other words, we needed to present Unexpected IKEA.
Can you tell us about your target audience, and how they influenced your strategy?
AF: Everything we create is for many individuals, to make sure that every one of them – be it a mom with a limited budget, a student that needs to arrange a work space or an art-lover with very refined taste – truly manages to find something suitable just for him/herself. This is what we kept in mind showing the variety of solutions in our “Living Books” project – from The Great Gatsby’s manor to the tiny green room of Little Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz.
What was your strategic insight, and how did you arrive at it?
AF: We often talk to people to get various insights regarding life at home.
And we discovered that no matter how different people are, they all want the same – their home should truly reflect their individuality.
But even when the picture of ideal home exists in people’s minds, one more problem appears – where to find everything at once: ideas, inspiration, products and solutions for reasonable prices.
We wanted to remind people that IKEA is ready to provide all of this in one place and cater for various homes, tastes and wallets.
What was the big idea that emerged from the strategy?
AF: Our big idea is reflected in our slogan – You have never seen such home before.
We wanted to help our customers look at their houses and life at home in a different way, and to show them that they don’t need much time or money to do so. IKEA has affordable products and solutions that fit any need and wallet and that can be used to bring to life any idea, no matter how unusual it is. Moreover, the more unusual it is, the better.
To show to our customers that with the help of IKEA products they can create really unexpected and original home furnishing solutions we decided to re-create the rooms from five famous books:
- “The Human Comedy” by Honoré de Balzac
- “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” by L.F. Baum
- “The Snow Queen” by G.C. Andersen
- “The Great Gatsby” by F.S. Fitzgerald
- “Master and Margarita” by M.A. Bulgakov
On IKEA.ru, we created a 360-degree video journey around all the rooms, guided by a host – in each room there was a theater actor reading an excerpt from the book with the description of the particular interior.
We also placed on our website videos where IKEA designers were explaining how to use tips and ideas from the interior you like in your own home.
Our Living Books interiors appeared in the metro, press, social media and digital banners.
Then all fourteen MEGA (IKEA) shopping centers in Russia had recreated rooms from Honoré de Balzac’s “The Human Comedy”, where anyone could have a professional photo taken and printed in the IKEA store. Additionally, MEGA shopping center visitors could take a VR “walk” through all five interiors of the literary project.
In TV advertising and cinema pre-rolls, the same rooms created from IKEA products were demonstrated as homes of real people, the main characters of the spot. And the rooms were so unexpected, that those who came to visit the main characters were even ready to bet it was not IKEA. But, of course, they had lost the bet.
The creative executions included images from many beloved books including “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” by Lyman Frank Baum, “The Great Gatsby” by Francis Scott Fitzgerald, and “The Snow Queen” by Hans Christian Anderson. How did you choose the books that were featured in the campaign?
AF: We conducted a study that revealed some interesting points: for example, 29% of the surveyed would want to live in a fairy tale, 15% would want to live in 19th century France, 15% would feel more comfortable at a gala ball in mid-1920’s America and 22% would gladly have “borsch” for dinner in old-time Moscow.
In a short period of time, we read dozens of books to find interior descriptions. Some of us were reading foreign literature, some Russian. Then from a big list, we selected the books that were known and loved by a wide audience in our country and at the same time contained a rather detailed description of the interior and of what’s happening in it.
It was also important that they were aimed at different kinds of readers, from Bulgakov lovers to the mothers that would read fairy tales to their children.
What was your biggest challenge in bringing your idea to life? How were you able to overcome that challenge?
AF: It was a challenge for us also to take a fresh look at ourselves and took certain efforts to move away from something that we are used to doing.
But this was an essential job, because without this we would not be able to present “Unexpected IKEA” to the people.
How did you measure the effectiveness of the effort? Were there any surprises?
AF: We wanted to inspire people, and I am quite sure that we managed to do that in a great and fascinating way. People got to see the whole spectrum of possibilities that we offer, aimed to help them improve their life at home. In total, we got in contact with 24,000,000 people
We got 1.4 million visits to the Live Books project page and general traffic on IKEA.ru grew +15%.
We also had a great response in traditional and social media, with 243 articles published and 163 posts made on social media. The posts got 170,000 likes and the videos from the project were viewed more than 3,500,000 times.
Thanks to all this, we managed to reach our goal for in-store visits, which is really a tough challenge in the current economic situation in Russia.
Is there anything else we should know about “Living Books”?
AF: A funny accident happened during the shooting of the TV commercial, “Спор (Argument)”. The idea of our TV commercial was that people would see such different IKEA products, that they would not even believe the [“Living Books”] designs could be created from them. [So] when people bet that the designs were not IKEA and lost, they had to do some strange things the winners asked them to. One of the things was to kiss a drooly dog. However, the dog [on set] did not want to… Therefore, we had to change three dogs until one of them finally agreed to tolerate the actor’s kisses.
The actor wasn’t quite happy about it, but he learned what he would do during the callbacks. But we can’t say the same about the dog.
“Спор (Argument)” video provided courtesy of IKEA Russia.
Anna Fokina, Country Marketing Communication Manager IKEA Russia
Anna was acquainted with IKEA long before joining the marketing team: first as a happy customer in 2000, then in 2007 as Account Director at Instinct creative agency, whose main client was IKEA.
Anna adores reading. She has a lot of favorite authors, but if she had to pick just one book to bring along on a deserted island, she would choose “The Master and Margarita” without any hesitation.
