Target audience:

Amidst a baffling digital environment, how could we accurately find likely IKEA consumers who love home furnishings, and convince them to browse IKEA’s humble online catalogue?

We discovered that Animal Crossing – the hottest video game of the year – attracted imaginative people with passion for interior decoration: exactly the qualities of IKEA’s target group.

Approach:

We issued a challenge: Who can produce an Animal Crossing version of the IKEA catalogue? Using a video game as our platform, we co-created entertaining content that proliferated across social media, driving throngs to the online IKEA catalogue, and shrewdly forging connections between three different platforms.

Throughout the process, players constantly flipped through every page of the original catalogue, analyzing its style, furniture and objects, sharing props and exchanging contents on social media. Through these powerful emotional connections, gamers joyously showed off and shared their accomplishments, generating copious Share of Voice and media impact.

Step 1: Mobilize the Animal Crossing gamer community

We invested significant time recreating the major interior spaces in the IKEA print catalogue, using only the furniture and objects in the game. Then, in gamer groups and our official website, we invited everyone to help replicate the catalogue.

Step 2: Ramp up the heat on social media

Every time gamers completed a page, we shared it on social media.

In real time, people compared Animal Crossing imitations to the original, sharing them, and voting for the ones they liked most. The winning images got to appear in the official Animal Crossing IKEA catalogue. It drove people to the online catalogue, generating colossal buzz and engagement.