In the aftermath of the pandemic, IKEA has seen both a lack of raw materials and challenges with delivery times, which made it harder to advertise the products. But in Norway at least there is no shortage of children, with a baby boom in 2021. Almost 3,000 more children were born in 2021 than the year before, which is an increase of 5.5%. This insight gave birth to a new service that aims to help soon-to-be parents in search of a unique baby name.

For more than 70 years IKEA has been giving names to products. So we looked through more than 15 000 pages of old IKEA catalogues, and gathered more than 800 unique baby names. Presenting The Name Catalogue – a physical and digital name bank.

Families with young children are one of the most desirable target groups in Norway. The competition for their attention is hard and IKEA must stay top of mind as a go-to shopping destination for soon-to-be parents, especially with IKEA's challenges with materials and delivery times due to the pandemic.

The Name Catalogue was first made available on ikea.no. The idea combines timely insight with both creativity and the rich history of IKEA as a furniture manufacturer. The campaign allowed the target group to engage with the brand in a completely different way than before. By creating a physical and digital name catalogue, you could take a deep dive into both all the names used by IKEA – but also experience the history of the brand through the decades. The Name Catalogue allowed us to talk about IKEA in a new way in both paid and earned media.

The campaign was first launched as a service on ikea.no. Then we told about the new service in traditional TV ads, social media, digital and printed media, newsletters for IKEA family members, physical catalogs in hospitals specializing in pregnancies, with name tags attached to children's furniture in warehouses, and last but not least our PR department sent out press releases both national and international.

The response was beyond anything we could imagine.

The campaign recruited over 70 000 unique visitors to ikea.no, with an average time spent of 1 minute and 18 seconds.

In total that’s 1 330 000 minutes or 22 167 hours spent to find the perfect name for your child. (Source: IKEA Norway).

The click rate on IKEA's newsletter was more than 85% and beyond comparable to previous campaigns in Norway.

We stopped counting the total number of media impressions at 50.000.000. This number is ten times larger than the population of Norway.

The campaign was a topic of discussion in big news outlets and other publications from around the world, as well as famous talk shows.

The campaign also sparked a debate. Multiple radio stations and podcasts discussed how to choose the right name, and the program Ukeslutt on NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting Cooperation) even invited a name researcher for an exclusive interview on the topic.