The Brief: IKEA US is turning 75. How can we increase the brand’s awareness and make them relevant to millennials?
For years IKEA has brought affordable well-designed furniture to consumers who have become die-hard champions for the brand. They’ve also fallen into a niche category as cheaper solutions for college kids or “my first apartment furniture” that you’ll eventually replace when you have more funds. How can we showcase to a new audience that IKEA furniture is smart but also durable?
Our response: Let’s bring IKEA out of the suburbs and into the city as a pop-up experience!
Pop-up shops give brands a unique opportunity to directly interact with consumers on a one-to-one basis without having to fight with other brands for attention. Once you have a consumer engaged you can speak to them directly and have a powerful influence on how your brand is received. We felt that if people were able to experience the furniture first-hand they would find that it was aesthetically pleasing and durable.
In order to achieve this, the team came up with an Augmented Reality game that could be played via anyone’s mobile device. IKEA is known for their hang tagging system, each item on the floor has a tag that tells you the name and location you can find it in the IKEA warehouse before you check out. We also tagged items in our rooms by placing AR markers that would trigger multiple-choice questions when scanned. There were 75 questions (for the anniversary) scattered throughout the 4 room experience, encouraging users to open drawers and cabinets on the scavenger hunt to get as many as possible. The better your score the better the prize at the end.
Visitors worked up quite an appetite going through the experience. When they reached the end, they were surprised to find IKEA’s famous meatballs waiting for them in three varieties (Beef, Chicken, and Veggie). They collected their food, their prize and everyone received the iconic IKEA Frakta bag and brand new catalog. The experience debuted in Soho, NYC and then traveled to Wicker Park (Chicago), Illinois
My role as Executive Producer on this project was to determine feasibility and scope, location logistics, build-out, vendor management, web development, augmented app development, and prizing distribution.
ClientIKEAServicesLogistics, Design, Build, Creative Tech, Game DevelopmentProd CoTH Productions, Internal
