IKEA was opening a new store in Malaysia, in an unknown residential area called Cheras. To get Malaysians to IKEA Cheras and generate excitement online, we had to make sure no one would ever forget the store’s location. We created a hit song so catchy, people couldn’t get our call-to-action out of their heads. The song combined unmistakably IKEA puns with over 40 dancing IKEA furniture in a music video that was launched on social media.

To get as much airplay as possible, we first seeded the music video with notable influencers who featured on their blogs and social networks. We then programmatically targeted music lovers with our music video ad. We continued by collaborating with Malaysia’s biggest online community – Says.com to propagate the content to avid social sharers. As per fan requests, we made the track discoverable on top social music platforms such as Spotify. We continued the momentum with 30 second spots on television and radio. To drive store launch attendance, we created social reminders on Facebook to get fans down to the store.

Overnight, “Get Cheras to Cheras” became a national catchphrase and appeared in news headlines both locally and globally. On the opening day, more than 3,000 people stood in line before the doors opened. Our main star of the film, KRAMIG the panda, sold out in 30 minutes. With visitor targets set based on the average footfall rate of the well-established IKEA Damansara, we had 46% more visitors on the opening day than expected. Across the 2 week opening period, visitors were 57% higher than target – 6x more than the average week at IKEA Damansara, the 4th most visited IKEA store in the world. (Source: IKEA Retail Dashboard) The video had a 2% share rate - 10x that of global industry share rate (0.2%) and had over 1.3 million views across Facebook, YouTube and other social platforms. (Source: Unruly Share Methodology)