App marketing naturally focuses on rational features and benefits. Whilst this worked well for our initial launch, we needed a fresh approach to re-engage tech thought leaders and excite a core Android user base. Instead of following the category tropes, we focussed on the human, emotional benefits of using IKEA Place...

Home furniture decisions can be stressful, but when it does go well, it’s delightful. Inspired by a Buzzfeed article that highlighted every kind of stress you can experience at IKEA, we decided to show how IKEA Place can act as a playful resolution to the pain of deciding ‘yellow’ or ‘blue’ and ‘this’ sofa or ‘that’ sofa.

The series was named ‘Matchers Keepers’, was hosted by comedian and Instagrammer @lowcheekbones, and featured real couples/roommates who had recently experienced ‘decision stalemate’.

The blog Android Police said: "Personally, I think it's one part Black Mirror and three parts extended cringe, but presumably there are people out there that dig this sort of thing." We definitely dig this comment.

We launched the series via IKEA owned channels and @lowcheekbones’ Instagram stories, seeded through PR and supported for 48 hours with a humble media spend. The series launch was timed to align perfectly with the Android ‘ARCore’ announcement.

Beyond the core episodes, we designed the campaign to be ‘news feed’ first, creating a series of 10” films, posts and Instagram stories to act as trailers. We also shot content to make smart use of YouTube’s ‘annotations’ to encourage viewers to watch subsequent episodes.

To date, IKEA Place for Android is achieving the same cadence of installs as it’s counterpart for iOS (over the same time period). Average dwell time with the app is over 4 minutes (that’s 4 minutes playing with a virtual IKEA - a new metric we’re starting to explore the value of).

The content has amassed over half a million views across owned platforms to date, with an organic retention rate over 85% (well above the avg. that hovers around 50%).