About Ikea
Ikea was founded in 1943 by Ingvar Kamprad, who was just seventeen. Ikea is now the world’s largest furniture retailer and has been since 2008. Ikea designs and sells ready-to-assemble furniture, kitchen appliances and home accessories. They have 365 stores across 45 different countries. (Harness et al., 2011).
What was their goal?
Due to Ikea’s large market share and vast amount of employees, they thought that it would be useful to create a programe that would connect all the business units together, as well as recognising the usefulness of social media and how it can be used to link regions, departments and applications. The fast paced nature of social media was taken as a tool that could benefit Ikea. Not only as it would allow them to understand real-time insights but also so that could share these with their employees, allowing them to make a difference in remarkably quick time. Ikea believed that this would morph them into a socially intelligent operation.
As social media is used by a large majority of the world, in my opinion, this idea of utilising it to help Ikea increase their brand awareness and customer reach, appears to be a faultless plan. Social media is free meaning it would allow them to market more at no extra cost and also view people’s opinions on the brand, highlighting areas that they need to work on.
Challenges faced
The idea of using social media and its benefits was widely accepted in most areas of the business, however they did face some challenges; the usage in different markets and departments was varied and the investment in the social media was therefore inconsistent. Another problem that they faced was that successful pieces of marketing and information were remaining isolated, meaning that they were not reaching the full potential of departments that could have found them useful.
I believe that Ikea could have avoided these problems if they had carried out an analysis of the social media, which they were planning to use, beforehand. This would have highlighted these problems before they had wasted their time creating successful marketing pieces and they could therefore have found ways to overcome these obstacles. I think that Ikea could have benefited from a step by step marketing plan.
Solution
Ikea decided to create a Listening Hub which was the first step towards them becoming the socially intelligent business that they were aspiring to become. This allowed them to build a social media command center where everyone could access customer insights across the organisation.
I personally feel that Ikea’s new listening hub has enhanced their social media dramatically, therefore increasing their target market and giving them a larger market share. Before creating the listening hub, their plan to become a socially intelligent business was failing, however the hub allowed them to share information easier and connect employees, not only together, but with the customers to allow for a more satisfying customer journey and higher customer loyalty. Without their want to become a socially intelligent business, Ikea may have stayed in the same position that they were in before, allowing other businesses to overtake them and as Brandwatch claim, “the Listening hub within Ikea’s headquarters provided the perfect setting to triage social intelligence”.
Therefore, you could argue that Ikea are now on the right path to becoming a socially intelligent business!
References
Harness, J., 1, R., 3, R. and S, R. (2011). 10 Things You Didn’t Know About IKEA. [online] Neatorama. Available at: http://www.neatorama.com/2011/04/22/10-things-you-didnt-know-about-ikea/ [Accessed 24 Oct. 2017].
Case study: Ikea and the Socializers, Brandwatch
By Tiffany Pocock