For Valentine’s Day, they launched a heartwarming campaign showcasing how IKEA furniture stands the test of time. From first apartments to family homes, these pieces are designed to last, offering the same comfort, style, and durability as life’s big transitions unfold.

The campaign highlights iconic IKEA products, like the BILLY Bookcase, BODBYN Drawer Front and PAX Wardrobe, that have been there for customers through single-hood, all the way to starting families.

Through a series of videos, Instagram carousels, and stories, Al-Futtaim IKEA and Memac Ogilvy captured the presence of these items, showing how IKEA furniture is built to withstand life’s milestones.

This Valentine’s Day, the campaign celebrates not just the love between people, but the furniture that has been there and supported us through every stage of life.

Ironic as it may sound, you don’t have to step outside to find beautiful outdoor scenery. Just look at your desktop wallpaper. It probably features the stunning geysers at Yellowstone Park, the green plains of Switzerland, the vast Arabian desert, or some other natural wonder.

Building on this irony, Al-Futtaim IKEA chose to showcase its outdoors collection through a digital campaign. IKEA launched ‘Iconic Outdoors’, a fun way to make your desktop fresh, outdoorsy, and absolutely adorable. Al-Futtaim IKEA transformed its entire outdoor collection—featuring hundreds of products—into downloadable icons, available on their website. Users could replace those messy folder icons and furnish their scenic wallpaper with the IKEA Outdoor Collection.

The campaign launched with three separate videos furnishing different wallpapers: a desert campout, a beach, and a grassy plain. Each video brought these landscapes to life using IKEA product icons fitting for the setting.

The experience is fun, interactive, and simply delightful. But most importantly, it puts the Al-Futtaim IKEA products in the hands of potential customers. By picking, mixing, and matching different items, users create outdoor scenes that spark inspiration—scenes they might replicate in their own gardens and patios.

To engage people on social media, Al-Futtaim IKEA uploaded its outdoor icons on GIPHY, allowing users to create virtual setups on their Instagram stories. They also launched a competition inciting people to join in. Three winners had their setups featured on digital screens in the IKEA stores.

As a digital-first campaign, Iconic Outdoors meets customers where they spend much of their time: at their laptops. It took the focus away from shopping and made it about designing something unique and personal.

So, once you’ve turned your desktop into a cozy retreat, remember to shut your laptop and step outside to enjoy the great weather.

With the pet care sector in the UAE soaring to a valuation of $300 million and approximately 1.5 million pet "parents" residing in the country, according to insights from the recent Pet World Arabia exhibition in Dubai, the significance of pets in homes is undeniable.

This new trend brings along new situations at home. Because on top of the unquestionable love four-legged buddies give in homes, they often also mess them up. IKEA decided to tap into those little accidents that every pet owner can relate to.

In line with IKEA’s global strategy, IKEA Al-Futtaim has launched a campaign portraying everyday products smashed by cute pets. Through "Don’t worry, you can afford it," the brand reassures the audience, implying there’s not much to worry about because getting a new one at such an affordable price makes it an easy fix.

The campaign showcases common items pets might knock over: a CHIAFRÖN plant pot, a FÄRGRIK mug, a KÄRLEKSGRÄS cushion, and a STILREN vase. It features dogs and cats, the most popular pets in the region.

Carla Klumpenaar, GM of Marketing, Communication & Interior Design, highlights, "For the past few years, we have noticed a growth of pets in households in the region, and we wanted to introduce this topic through this campaign for the first time. Over the next few days, we will also launch a collection of household products for pets".

The campaign, created by the creative boutique INGO Hamburg, has been published in different media throughout the region.

In the words of INGO’s Global CCO, Tobias Ahrens, "We are excited about this campaign, which, on one hand, brings the unskippable cuteness of pets, and on the other hand, challenges marketing conventions by showing the products damaged – an honest story that refreshes the usual IKEA price communication style.”

Ad Awareness asks consumers if they have seen an advertisement for a brand in the previous two weeks, and the difference between low and high scores for the month determines our Advertisers of the Month.

IKEA Family launched a new campaign in association with the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors without Borders (MSF) called The Giving Room. A hospital room was set up at IKEA’s Dubai store for consumers to experience and understand the lack of medical resources in conflict zones and turn awareness into donations by scanning QR codes on items. YouGov BrandIndex shows IKEA Family’s Ad Awareness metric rose by eight percentage points from 15.2% on November 27 to 23.2% on December 23.

Laundry detergent retailer Persil worked with social media influencers to create short-form video content about “stainable moments” that Persil can wash away. A recent post has garnered more than 19000 likes on Instagram. Persil saw a rise of 7.5 percentage points in its Ad Awareness score from 15.3% on November 30 to 22.8% on December 23.

Ranking third on our list is Etisalat which rose 7.3 percentage points from 29.8% on December 1 to 37.1% on December 23. Etisalat, in collaboration with Nokia, demonstrated the fastest passive optical network (PON) speed in the Middle East. It achieved speeds of up to 100 gigabits per second (Gb/s) on a single wavelength – four times faster than the most advanced networks available today. The company also held the third edition of the ‘Hello Business Pitch’ competition, where aspiring start-ups participate in raising capital.

Methodology 
YouGov BrandIndex collects data on thousands of brands every day. A brand’s Ad Awareness score is based on the question: “Which of the following consumer brands have you seen an advertisement for in the past two weeks?” Data from surveys of adults aged 18 years and above residing in the UAE from 26 November to 25 December 2022. Ad Awareness scores are based on a four-week moving average. The change in scores for each brand is calculated by taking the difference between the highest and lowest scoring days within the period. Learn more about BrandIndex.  

This transformation had already begun in many ways with consumers’ adoption of digital lifestyles. The pandemic accelerated and widened it. If on a personal basis, the crisis reminded us of the importance of relationships, staying close to our loved ones despite the distance, on a business level, it’s the power of collaboration in making us agile to respond optimally that stood out.

People

Our first concern was our staff and customers, so we shut stores and redirected business to digital platforms. Thankfully, these had been worked on for several years, so we hit the ground running, so to speak, managing a 200% increase in our online traffic and transactions in the first two months of restrictions.

When people were forced indoors, their home became the center of their universe. They lived, ate, studied, worked, socialized, exercised there. While the expected increase in home office furniture did materialize, the rise in demand was actually across the board.

We detected this shift in consumer sentiment and behavior early on and adapted by connecting and engaging with our audiences. Through content and storytelling on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, we shared ideas and solutions through online platforms on a micro-moment level. We offered advice on how to live better at home, adding value at this particular time. It wasn’t about selling more but providing reassurance and comfort.

Partners

We saw how our Asian operations were impacted by the pandemic and the restrictions applied in response. The fact that our markets of operation are in the Middle East and North Africa allowed us to be more agile in our logistical fulfilment from hubs in Europe and Asia. We also eased the pressure of rising e-commerce volumes on our supply chain by investing heavily in our last mile resources and increasing our fleet capacity three-fold overnight.

Agility has been the order of the day with the pandemic. Remote work had to work for us to stay safe, but it also made us more productive and innovative. The roll-out of services, like Click+Collect or virtual interior design, took weeks rather than months, without anyone having to work 24/7. Our agency partners came up with more creative campaigns and more ideas.

Today, clients require new levels of collaboration, more and faster interactions as well as more efficiency and better quality. It’s particularly true in social content. We’ve started to internalize several aspects of our communications, particularly the customer experience, with the site and e-commerce platforms. While most of our production happens internally, we rely on this external expertise for major parts of our marketing, including strategy, media and the mining and activation of data.

Data and technology

Data allows us to refine our understanding of our audiences and their lifestyles to tailor experiences that maximize visits and transactions. Our audiences are segmented first on their living situations (alone, with a partner, with children or an extended family), with additional layers applied, with thousands of criteria. Through social listening, we gauge demand and interests. We also rely on our loyalty program for our funnel approach, using it as meta-data to create custom audiences and then lookalike audiences to improve our campaign performance.

Before the pandemic, we used these segments in social campaigns to stimulate in-store traffic, optimizing ad impressions on people most likely to visit. Once restrictions were implemented, we used data to drive online traffic to our sites. We turned some stores into order fulfilment centers, where shoppers could collect their online orders. In just a couple of weeks, these represented 5% of our sales. Most of the growth of our online sales in the last two years, from 2% to 17%, happened this year.

This is reshaping the retail experience. Consider our new city center stores, like in Abu Dhabi’s Al Wahda Mall. At 2,000 sq. ft, it’s less than 10% of our typical store. It is a new concept that brings the experience closer to people. It has strong digital solutions for shoppers to interact with the furniture physically, through an Augmented Reality feature on the shopping app, for example, or indeed buy it online. Where people buy is irrelevant.

Incorporating shopping habits and transactional data is extremely important on a macro level. Linking that with a strong content strategy framework will allow retailers to develop content that is relevant interesting, and creative for the right customer. Bridging the gap between online/offline is critically important, and we’ve been looking at integrating OOH with digital. The point is to communicate with people at a relevant micro-moment when they need the brand.

Brands and designers

IKEA started collaborating with brands and designers like Lego or Virgil Abloh before the pandemic. The Markerad collection with Abloh was more for young people newly becoming independent. We explored the intersection of design and pop culture and saw massive potential in artistic products made by a respected designer at an affordable price. Last year, we collaborated with Nada Debs, a famous Lebanese designer, for a Ramadan collection. The result is LJUV, a contemporary Middle Eastern collection with vintage geometry patterns. It will become a feature again next year.

The collaboration with Lego came from the understanding of each of the brands’ strengths. Lego is an expert at providing children and adults a space to imagine and create. So, when Lego came to us with the idea of collaborating together, we had to play. Here in the region, we built IKEA furniture with Lego bricks as a stunt, a big surprise for shoppers.

These brand-building collaborations are more long-term than short-term. Brands must keep investing in collaboration with designers, exploring with young talent, giving them a podium to create new solutions.

To attract customers and make them loyal, brands need to constantly stay top of mind and relevant. Our growth will come from new markets, but also new niches and segments. People’s priorities are changing and collaborations help us keep abreast of them. The crisis reminded us of the power of relationships and mutual understanding. It sounds like a cliché but united we’re stronger. Ultimately, we will win as a collective because we are all intimately connected.

Have a look at the case study here!

Beginning Wednesday, the 75-year-old Swedish retailer is doing its first national out-of-home push in the US, where it operates 48 stores, and hosting live catalog pop-up shops in New York City and Chicago. This year’s print catalog debuted this month.

“We’re sharing content in new ways because consumers are consuming content in new ways,” explains Kendra Ferguson, media project manager for Ikea North America, which is headquartered in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania. “We’re doing more digital and having experiences so people can interact with us more.”

Later this year, Ikea will also feature giant pop-up catalogs, sized 10 feet by 10 feet, in some urban areas. Billboards in high-profile areas such as New York’s Times Square will feature a digital rendering that turns 2D catalog pages into animations created by Vidmob.

Ferguson notes that while the furniture chain is spending less on catalog mailings – the chain mailed 50 percent fewer this year – it has redirected that money in the new campaign so that year-over-year spending is the same.

Ikea, which did 38.3 billion euros in sales last year, employed Ogilvy for creative duties on the campaign and Wavemaker on media duties. The retailer spent $96.5 million on measured media in the US last year, including $10.2 million on catalogs, according to Kantar Media.

Separately, the company is rolling out a new 90-second spot in Sweden that shows consumers singing to Mozart as they enjoy both privacy and togetherness. Ferguson says Ikea has studies that show 42 percent of consumers find it hard to find a space of their own when sharing a home.