IKEA International A/S

• Author: Kevin Teague
• Pages: 755-758

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Box 640

Helsingborg, SE 25 106

Sweden

Telephone: 46 42 267100

Fax: 46 42 132805

Web site: www.IKEA.com

UNBÖRING CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW

In 2002 IKEA was the world's largest home-furnishing retail chain and had just released plans to open 60 to 70 new stores across Asia, Europe, and North America. Although most people in U.S. metropolitan areas were already familiar with the Swedish home retailer, many Americans living in smaller cities and suburban areas were not. To increase its brand recognition in the United States, IKEA launched its "Unböring" campaign, the title of which was fashioned with a fake umlaut as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the company's Swedish heritage.

After 11 years with Deutsch Inc. as its ad agency and a brief contract with Carmichael Lynch, in 2002 IKEA signed over its advertising budget, estimated at $45 million, to Crispin Porter + Bogusky, an agency based in Miami. For the new campaign the agency focused on a phenomenon that it called "furniture guilt" or "old furniture gravity," which it described as Americans' compulsion to keep outdated furniture. "Lamp," the first television spot, featured an old red lamp that had been replaced by a new IKEA lamp. The lamp's curbside doom was accompanied by poignant piano music. In the spot's final few seconds a man with a Swedish accent appeared and scoffed at the audience's sympathies. "Many of you feel bad for this lamp. That's because you [are] crazy. It has no feelings. And the new one is much better." "Unböring" continued into 2005; all ads featured the word "Unböring" at the end. Print, Internet, and billboard ads were employed along with a heavy catalog launch at North American IKEA stores.

"Unböring" earned several awards and occurred during a critical point in IKEA's U.S. market expansion. The first television spot, "Lamp," received the campaign's greatest accolades, snagging the Grand Prix at the Cannes International Advertising Festival along with the Grand Clio. IKEA sales in the United States, which was IKEA's second-largest market, increased by 8 percent between 2002 and 2003. "There was a lot of discussion about the whole IKEA campaign," Clio juror Bob Scarpelli told Adweek. "We agreed that it plays with your emotions and perception the way few commercials do. You feel uneasy when you see it. That's great. It makes you think."

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

With its first store appearing in Sweden in 1958, IKEA climbed to the position of world's top furniture retailer by designing hip, Bauhaus-inspired furnishings and shipping them unassembled to reduce labor costs. The first U.S. IKEA opened in Philadelphia in 1985, and in the early nineties, Los Angeles became the site of the first West Coast IKEA. In 1989 IKEA awarded Deutsch, an agency based in New York, the company's advertising

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HISTORICAL CONTEXT © Jerry McCrea/Star Ledger/Corbis. budget. Linda Sawyer, managing partner and CEO for Deutsch, told Advertising Age, "Ikea was pivotal to us. Its growth paralleled our own. It was the reason we invested in direct marketing, the reason we moved into interactive." The agency created commercials for IKEA that some considered controversial, including a 1994 spot featuring a gay couple picking out a dining-room table from IKEA. The agency's contract lasted 11 years, at which point IKEA briefly signed with the Minneapolis-based shop Carmichael Lynch

With plans to expand its retail presence in North America, in 2002 IKEA switched agencies again, choosing Crispin Porter + Bogusky after seeing the agency's work. "They identified in the pitch a real strategic opportunity that we now see translated into the creative, and that was to challenge the home furnishing that is out there," Christian Mathieu, external marketing manager for...