This post will analyse Ikea’s digital development strategy from a business student’s perspective. Ikea worked alongside the socializers agency to improve their digital development with a focus on utilising social media. Ikea is a global brand with a highly successful strategy which has been exemplified by Michael Porter of Harvard Business School. More on this can be found here http://www.isc.hbs.edu/strategy/creating-a-successful-strategy/pages/making-strategic-trade-offs.aspx.   The success of the Ikea is identified as one of the key challenges faced by their digital development team as they suggest that creating disruptive change can be difficult in a business that is already high performing. Another of the key challenges the team faced was that much of the data that Ikea had access to was not shared between business areas, this is common in large enterprises.

However, Ikea and the socializers came up with an innovative solution to overcome these challenges. They wanted to create a ‘listening hub’ so they could find out what their customers were saying on social media. It was decided that the best technology to utilise for this purpose was Brandwatch Vizia. Using this innovative technology, senior management were able to quickly identify what their customer’s were saying utilising a user friendly platform that allowed them to customise the platform to quickly establish information they required. This allowed them to quickly share information amongst departments and regions which fostered the collaboration which may have been missing in the business before. From the listening hub they were able to identify the two main websites their customers used to complain in the US. They also established that US customers were far more likely to make complaints via facebook than British customers who generally complained using online forums to discuss customer service issues. By sharing these insights across departments the digital team were in a position to inform Ikea where they could improve the brand perception, which brand ambassadors they could influence and which relevant topics they could use to boost their online reputation.

This case suggests that a strong social media strategy can foster collaboration between departments which has been cited as crucial for business success. Furthermore, knowing what your customers are saying about your brand is essential to make improvements. With more and more customers using social media to discuss customer service a focus on understanding these avenues is essential for businesses. Using technology such as Brand Vizia could be effective to obtain and display this information quickly and efficiently, particularly for larger corporations who are in a position to invest in such technology. Ultimately this case highlights the importance of ‘big data’ in modern business and fostering it to create useful insights can help improve an organisations collaboration, brand and customer service.  There are many other reasons that highlight the importance of big data which can be found below.

http://www.sas.com/en_us/insights/analytics/big-data-analytics.html