IKEA: Make it Family-Friendly

This film offset images of smiling families with a more realistic, modern scenario: a kid dealing with his parents’ divorce. Åkestam Holst’s Chief Strategy and Business Officer, Jerker Winther, said: “We've started portraying IKEA products in an emotional as opposed to a functional way. There are a lot of different family situations, and that is a huge market. One in every five marriages in Sweden ends up in divorce; that's 20% of the market for IKEA.”

This piece shows how to use a brand asset to address an audience challenge in a playful, attention-grabbing way. During a baby boom in 2021, parents in Norway struggled to find a unique name for their newborns. So IKEA created a bank of 800 names based on the quirky titles of IKEA items. ‘The Name Catalogue’ generated 50m media impressions and attracted more than 70,000 people to IKEA Norway’s website.

It’s not often customers are asked to pee on a print ad. The ‘IKEA Pee Ad’ doubled as a pregnancy test, offering those with a positive result a discount on an IKEA cot. The promotion achieved 4.3bn global impressions and proved so popular that IKEA Sweden ran out of cribs. It shows how to breathe new life into a traditional format, reinforcing the brand’s ‘Where Life Happens’ strapline in an attention-grabbing way.

A young boy wins over a grumbling troll by helping to brighten up his living space in this two-minute film. The ad shows how to draw families in with warm storytelling that is grounded in a human truth – that our homes affect how we feel.

A brand doesn’t often admit that it’s second best. But IKEA flipped the formula, using gentle humour to acknowledge that an IKEA cot or high chair will never compare to a parent or carer’s lap. The approach demonstrates the importance of humility: by making parents, not products, the stars of its campaign, IKEA showed that it understood and appreciated its audience. This also humanised the brand and put its family values top of mind.