This case shows that strategy is a discipline that not only isn’t separated from creativity, but also plays a crucial role in the execution.

When strategy, creativity and execution are a single process, fluid ideas emerge. Ideas in which one does not quite know where entertainment leaves off and marketing begins. Such ideas transcend the classic definition of advertising. These ideas make us feel uneasy because they are difficult to produce, impossible to classify and blow to bits the very definition of what we do.

At the end of the day, isn’t that precisely what our profession is all about?

In 2021, in line with the company’s commitment to sustainability, IKEA stopped producing its new product catalogue. The most important marketing tool the brand had ever had, one which reached 8.5M homes in Spain, ceased to exist.

In consequence, IKEA’s 2021newness campaign was faced with the responsibility of compensating for the loss of its principal asset for building awareness, brand desire, product aspirationality, purchase intent and newness perception.

COMMERCIAL OBJECTIVES

- Maximize IKEA new product sales (offline and online).

CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR

- Generate traffic to IKEA.es.

- Increase intention to visit an IKEA store.

- Increase purchase intent.

- Increase the perception of inspiration, value proposition and range appeal.

BRAND METRICS

- Increase the new IKEA products awareness.

- Increase Total Brand Communication Awareness.

- Improve knowledge and the association of IKEA with new products.

- Strengthen the Emotional Meaning of the brand.

In addition to the profound void left by the loss of the IKEA catalogue, in the category of Home Furnishing in Spain, 47% of consumers affirmed that it is important to them for a furniture brand to launch new products, making the introduction of new products the second most important sales driver after price.

What is more, the competitive panorama in this category is complex and fragmented. In the last three years, the number of competitors in the minds of consumers has grown from 111 to 135, while powerful competitors such as Amazon and Zara Home continued to increase their advertising investment year after year.

For these reasons, we could not be content with a conventional type of new product campaign. We needed an unexpected strategy and creativity that would break with all established standards, both in the Home Furnishing category and in the retail market in general.

The main problem with communicating products as newness is that, after many years, the products no longer seem new.

IKEA’s practical solutions and designs at affordable prices were a proposal of value that had become naturally integrated into Spanish life for 25 years. Spanish consumers had taken IKEA for granted and, without a catalogue that could be leafed through, there was really no feeling of anticipation or attraction about the new products of the brand.

But, as happens with many aspects of life, you never value something so much as when you lose it.

And Spaniards losing the catalogue was… like Spain losing IKEA.

That’s why we focused precisely on the generation of Spaniards who were born in the late 90s (25 years old or younger), called the “IKEA Natives”, that is, those who have never known what life was like without IKEA… to take IKEA away from them.

Depriving an entire generation of IKEA couldn’t be done with a simple TVC.

So we decided to create an experience that was 100% real in the form of a reality show to mimic the pain that the lack of the catalogue meant for the Spanish audience, pushing this feeling to the extreme.

A hilarious trip to the past was ready to start. We put six IKEA Natives into a house from the 90s that lacked any sort of IKEA product, mercilessly confronting them with a hostile world filled with challenges such as sleeping without a Nordic duvet using heavy and itchy blankets instead, try to organize all the beauty and hygiene stuff in one single bathroom without any storage solutions or trying to relax after a sweaty aerobics class on a vinyl-upholstered sofa.

Thus was born the reality show “Trapped in the 90s”.

TIT90s became one of the most important communication milestones in IKEA’s history.2

- Revenue from newness product sales: +169%.

- In the whole year 2021, 76% of the TV driven total offline sales came from TIT90s, with a ROI of 14.8.

- Despite being a sales campaign in nature, TIT90s had a far bigger role in the brand building ROI than all the IKEA’s brand building communication of the whole year combined.

- Despite IKEA’s total media investment decreasing by 3.4% in 2021, the brand drove 29% more sales, improving ROI by 34% to 13.5 and driving 61M more revenue at a higher ROI. The main contributing campaign for this record was TIT90s

- With the 24.81% of the total media budget, TIT90s generated 85.1M in revenue. Compared with “Wellbeing”, the campaign with the highest investment in 2021 (45.3%), TIT90s generated +19% more revenue with half the investment .

Gen Z was born around the same time as IKEA arrived in Spain. For them, the brand belonged in TV ads and their parents’ dusty paper catalogues. They took it for granted. So, to make them love IKEA, we took it away, locking up six Gen Zers in a house from the past with zero IKEA solutions. The only way to escape the nightmare was by winning challenges rewarded with IKEA products. Each featured product was linked to IKEA’s online store, steering the brand from dusty paper catalogues to a world of seamless commerce that could be accessed from any platform.