IKEA'S Facebook Showroom
By Xuanling Li
IKEA Facebook Showroom was a creative campaign created by ad agency Forsman and Bodenfors in 2009, which promoted IKEA’s new store in Sweden. This campaign focused on tagged images on the personal Facebook page specially created by the new store manager named Gordon Gustavsson. The campaign went on for two weeks, where Gordon uploaded 12 different images of new store’s showrooms to his Facebook page, and then invited people who had requested Gordon as friends to tag themselves to a specific item in each showroom image so that they could win that particular product.
Strengths
This campaign won a Gold Cyber Lion at Cannes International Advertising Festival. As Hutchings (2012) says “Effective social media campaigns can result from a positive customer response and the viral spread by willing consumers of successful concepts and messages contained in campaigns.” Here, what made it successful? Firstly, it was targeted at active Facebook users who are natives of Facebook participation that engaged in the campaign by tagging, following, and sharing behaviours. Instead of creating a company Facebook page, it ran by a store manager who created a personal account and used as products showroom by uploading images and text. People who had requested him as friends could receive and access to his newsfeeds about IKEA.
Secondly, for this campaign, both audiences and advertisers were active. On the one hand, audiences were able to receive Gordon’s news feed after being friends with Gordon, which means these individuals were potentially welcomed kind of commercial-used-update and participative activities on Facebook. Then, audiences were invited to participate in the campaign and had interaction with the advertisers by followed, commented and shared news feed. On the other hand, advertisers were active because they clearly knew Facebook active users are their target audiences, and they had control on spreading the advertising to avoid it becoming spam. Meanwhile, they successfully won audiences’ affection so the invitation was persuasive and audiences’ engagements were increased as it progressed. Furthermore, advertisers easily collected and tracked the data, to receive feedback, and to fix issues in an efficient way on Facebook.
Thirdly, engagements made by individuals will show on every Facebook user’s timeline so that friends in the network instantly knew the campaign and potentially took part in this online competition. In other words, friend-to-friend sharing behavior made the campaign reach a high exposure nationally and internationally. According to Veenendaal, ‘Instead of just looking at a banner with furniture, we got people them to personally promote IKEA said Forsman & Bodenfors on their YouTube video’. Thus, as an advertiser, understanding customers’ behavior on social networking sites is crucial because it enables advertisers to attract their target audiences’ attention on the ad.
Furthermore, this online campaign budget was low as to sign up a Facebook account was free, and it used the existing function of Facebook like tagging, and sharing content that enable IKEA to increase the reach of promotional information. Therefore, social media could be considered as a low budget online tool for a campaign by using existing function of social networking sites, which is an important factor influencing a campaign development and success. Meanwhile, the design of a campaign needs to be as simple as possible so that customers can easy to use and involve in it, in order to increase the interaction between customers and campaign/advertisers.
Weaknesses
However, as the results of the campaign only had been alive for two weeks that it cannot be repeated after IKEA completed the new store opening. Meafnwhile, Facebook had taken an action that changed terms and conditions in order to prevent their user to publish commercial-used feeds like this type of thing from happening again. Therefore, the store manager’s profile page and his newsfeeds are no longer available online.
Moreover, there is weakness regarding with this campaign design was using a personal profile page of new store manager. Users cannot participate in the campaign without Gordon’s confirmation for connection on Facebook, which means the reach of the promotional information would be delayed to some extent.
Conclusion
Although this campaign had issues for kept it alive online for a long time, and the commercial-use of Facebook is controversial, it still can be considered as successful that used Facebook to delivery their branding promotional information to their target audiences efficiently. As a result, IKEA Facebook showroom is a good example that helped IKEA to achieve their goal that promoted its products, as well as raised the awareness of IKEA’s new store opening. Thus, the use of social media in advertising tends to be a trend in the future of advertising industry. The potential for marketing promotion of social networking sites are reading high as the fast developing of technology and the online world. Compared with advertisers-to-customers traditional advertising, social media offer great opportunities for advertisers to easily and effectively reach their goal about products promotion and even make it viral nowadays. The interaction between advertisers and customers about an online campaign had shifted to customers-to-customers structure regarding with highly user-control of social media.