Ikea Makes House Calls, Produces Web Series

By Hannah Ash, contributing writer

Ikea Takes A Road Trip Through Customer Engagement

For some retailers, breaking down barriers means breaking down doors. This month, five Ikea employees are hitting the road to take Ikea’s message directly to customer homes in select cities throughout the United States. The Ikea Home Tour, which will take place over the course of the next year, is being filmed and broadcast via YouTube. Ikea has chosen five cities to visit over the following twelve months and will be holding corresponding events in each market. In addition to YouTube, the home tour will also be promoted using social media outlets Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram as platforms for updates and sparking customer conversations.

Consumers in the tour’s target cities of Atlanta, Charlotte, Washington D.C./Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City can nominate themselves to participate in the Home Tour. The Home Tour squad, composed of current Ikea employees, will identify design challenges, devise solutions and then set about putting their plans into action. The Ikea Home Tour YouTube page serves as a launching pad for the campaign as it showcases event information, videos, squad information and design inspiration as well as links to Home Tour related Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram pages. In each video released on YouTube by Ikea, products shown are available for purchase by clicking a link displayed directly below the video; the link delivers customers to the corresponding Ikea product information page.

Though commerce inspired tours through American cities are not necessarily a new phenomenon (Ben & Jerry’s and Oscar Meyer are frequent tourers), Ikea takes the retail tour a step further by turning it into a television-style format to be broadcast on YouTube. The use of Twitter and Instagram to promote the tour indicate Ikea is getting socially innovative to find the millennial generation where they hang out most. Founder of Richmond, VA marketing company The Mom Complex, Katherine Wintsch comments that millennials expect more from advertisers. “They’re more likely to ignore things that don’t have an impact, explains Wintsch. “They’re more likely to skip the ad. Getting their attention is much harder.” Surely Ikea’s new Web series will garner some attention from millennials over the next twelve months.

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