The people of Sweden love the IKEA brand, but are slowly falling out of love with IKEA’s products. Buying IKEA furniture has grown to be seen as a conventional and boring choice in Sweden, which threatens long-term penetration and market share.

To re-ignite the love affair with IKEA products, we launched a new communication concept - ”Where life happens”. The concept aimed to highlight the thoughtfulness built into every IKEA product, and show how all IKEA’s products were designed to play important emotional roles in customers lives. That IKEA’s understanding how people really live is expressed in every product.

The brief for this assignment was to create a digital initiative that helped rekindle the love for IKEAs products and show their emotional value.

Key objectives were to increase product liking and show that IKEA has products for every stage in life.

The hub of the campaign was http://ikearetailtherapy.com. The site was launched as a ”stealth initiative” without obvious promotion. We bought Google keywords based on the most common search phrases to secure visibility, but gradually the relationship solutions rose in the organic searches as well.

The initiative was picked up by international media – from American tv-shows to local newspapers all over the world. Even Google themselves praised the initiative on Twitter, asking ”Nice one IKEA. What’s your solution for ”ate too many Swedish meatballs?”. To which we responded with an IKEA solution.

All this drove traffic directly to the campaign site ikearetailtherapy.com, a library of relationship problems, with ”related problems” keeping visitors on the site. When hitting the ”buy-button” you were redirected to IKEA's main shopping site. It was also possible to read about ”democratic design” - IKEA's design philosophy regarding products inspired by life itself.