For the past 25 years, IKEA has been facing the Chinese cultural superstition where in the months of July and August, also known as the Ghost Months, all home construction, house moving or any types of home furnishing projects are prohibited because some believe it may bring bad luck. In order to stimulate sales during this specific period, we needed to explore new business opportunities even with almost no media budget allocated for this period as its perceived as too risky and too difficult to overturn the cultural superstition.

Through social listening and sharp eyes on Taiwan’s daily news, we found a significant amount of news highlighting housing shortage in and around colleges campus during July and August, because students need to get ready for the new academic year. We also learned that most students had to sacrifice quality of life in exchange for affordable cost of living. They are eager for help and too inexperienced to know where to find helps.

College students are extremely active on social media, we found a good number of students sharing pictures of their rooms with hashtag #whatsinmyroom–but we know usually only nice-looking ones would share, and most of the time, they don’t reflect the real state. So this was the approach towards our media strategy. When considering communication on social platforms, we know young generations dislike ads, and normally skip them, yet when they see contents shared by peers, they would pay lots of attention to…due to FOMO (fear of missing out), we decided to initiate an authentic campaign showing “the real room” of students to generate publicity and arouse their interests. We partnered with Dcard, the largest campus social network and forum in Taiwan allowing users to stay anonymous, to gather housing issues as our user-generated-content and further reached a larger audience to build the resonance of the campaign and their “real” life.

The new project used a new and very interesting hashtag of “#WTFmyroom” instead of the original “#whatsinmyroom”; we invited students to vote and share their current housing and living issues. Based on their feedback and top issues they voted on, we created solution-solving videos to show quick hacks to solve those most commons issues in student’s accommodation, and did total room makeover for the two rooms that received the highest “votes” and decorated the rooms with affordable furnitures. The makeover content was collected and then filmed to be exposed virally on Facebook and YouTube; as a result, we successfully drew enormous attention and resonance of Taiwanese.

With less than 1% of annual budget, IKEA managed to record their best ever “ghost month” sales performance, surpassing annual sales target by bringing in a new group of consumers into the store in 2018.

Media performance:

350% growth in engagement

26% growth in discussion vs YA

Business performance:

Double the number of visitors and sales vs annual growth

Sales +14% vs. YA

Visitation + 16% vs YA