Outdoor > Ambient & Experiential
IKEA WINDOW SHOPPING
RETHINK, Toronto / IKEA / 2023
Awards:
Overview
Credits
Overview
Background:
For decades, city-dwellers have had to venture outside of the downtown core to get to IKEA. After years without a downtown presence, IKEA was at risk of being seen as a suburban brand catering only to suburban people, losing share to more accessible brands located downtown. As we launched a new IKEA store in downtown Toronto, we needed to powerfully demonstrate that our new outlet was designed with downtown living in mind. And as the cost of living has gone up around the world, downtown living has come to mean paying more money for less space. We needed to show how IKEA can make small space living easier and more affordable, while authentically connecting with a new audience in the downtown core.
Describe the Impact:
The launch campaign garnered 62+ media stories, and 31+ million impressions and made an instant splash in the city. While the campaign was in-market, the new downtown store saw foot traffic 41% higher than the baseline, not to mention the noticeable lines that formed outside the store every day. In our quarterly brand tracking isolated for Toronto, we saw a +4% in TOM awareness (our key metric), as well as an increase in brand trust by over +1%. Importantly, Toronto consumers feeling inspired by IKEA lifted by +1%.
Write a short summary of the ambient work.
As the cost of living has gone up around the world, downtown living has come to mean paying more money for less space. We needed to show how IKEA can make small space living easier and more affordable, while authentically connecting with a new audience in the downtown core.
To demonstrate how IKEA’s offering is tailored to small-space living, we showcased our product range in action inside real people’s homes by creating billboards out of the homes themselves. Our living billboards were custom designed and built to seamlessly fit the exterior of downtown homes, creating a “window” into a living IKEA showroom, clearly demonstrating IKEA’s relevance to downtown living.
Is there any cultural context that would help the jury understand how this work was perceived by people in the country where it ran?
Toronto’s downtown core is closely surrounded by unique neighborhoods made up of single-family homes. While this city planning strategy (or lack thereof) has created an extremely high cost of living and limited supply of living spaces - it also meant that our “living billboards” on people’s real homes were within neighborhoods close to the downtown Toronto store that was easily accessible through public transit. This quirk of Toronto’s layout meant that we were able to represent all different kinds of living spaces (homes, apartments, shared spaces) within a close enough range for our audience to actually go to the downtown store.
More Entries from Special Build in Outdoor
24 items
More Entries from RETHINK
24 items
