It may seem strange to people in other countries, but Italians are prepared to do anything to get their hands on a copy of the new IKEA catalogue. This shared fact in Italian culture is confirmed by continuous in-depth web monitoring. Through careful listening activities, we've found that almost 25% of online conversations about the release of the new IKEA catalogue contain ironic and intimate comments from users who confess with no particular sense of guilt to stealing catalogues from neighbours, colleagues and even their own family. How dissuade them from stealing the new 2017 IKEA catalogue? By making it totally unappealing! That's why IKEA, for the first time in its history, disguise its catalogue with The Changing Catalogue: a quirky collection of fake covers designed to transform each copy of the catalogue into a magazine that nobody would ever steal.

We've designed a collection of 10 fake covers that mimic real magazines which are actually on sale and cater to the smallest of niche markets. Launched on all the brand's digital and social channels with an ironic and surreal video, the project involved not only IKEA fans and followers, but also customers and registered members. In fact, the release of the video was followed by a mailing of the new disguised 2018 catalogue directly to the homes of 50,000 registered IKEA members and to 100 of the top influencers and design bloggers in Italy, the creation on the brand's official website of a tool to allow users to download and print their favourite covers in the comfort of their own homes, and the organisation of a series of events in the brand's 21 Italian stores to distribute over 360,000 covers to customers.

Over 625,000 covers downloaded and printed on the brand's official website, which added to over 362,000 covers handed out to customers in stores (and sold out in a week!) and 50,000 covers sent directly to the homes of IKEA members, makes a total of 1,000,000 catalogues saved.

And still: +165% conversations about the IKEA catalogue, +35% site traffic, 30% awareness, 98% likeability.

Articles and mentions on Italian and international websites and in magazines about design, but not only design: from Adweek to Vanity Fair, via Fubiz, DesignTAXI, Not Cot and Wired.

For the first time, the IKEA catalogue hasn't been used as a straightforward product showcase, but it became a media. Thanks to our quirky collection of covers, we demonstrated the value of the brand and the appeal of its iconic publication by disguising it.

To welcome in the new Italian positioning of "We are meant to change", and at the same time to increase the brand's desirability for the launch of the catalogue and the new IKEA collection, we embarked on intensive listening activities that revealed an exquisitely Italian reality: for Italians, the IKEA catalogue is a true object of desire. It is so well loved, anxiously waited for and ardently desired that 25% of users who talk about it on social networks say they steal a copy from their neighbours, colleagues and family members. This is the origin of The Changing Catalogue: the most direct and ironic creative response to an exquisitely Italian fact. The target is represented by the wide IKEA customers: everyone who receives either the physical version or the digital one, spread around all Italian country.

With over 210 million copies printed each year, the IKEA catalogue is the world's most popular and widely distributed publication. Particularly in Italy, where the release of each new edition is always regarded as an extraordinary event and the publication itself is seen as more than just a catalogue, becoming a true object of desire. So, how to launch in Italy the 2017 IKEA catalogue underlining its profile as a real cult?