I have only just come across what I think is a great mobile marketing campaign from IKEA, the worldwide-famous brand.

They developed and distributed a mobile application that helps consumers visualize the IKEA PS line of furniture in their own living spaces. From the article:

Here’s how it works:

• In the application are images of many of the pieces of furniture from the new IKEA PS line. The customer selects the product they are interested in, and then selects “Take a Picture”.
• The customer aims the camera of the phone at the area of the room where the furniture might be placed. The image of the room appears on the phone screen, along with the IKEA furniture. The furniture can be scaled larger or smaller to make it fit better in the scene.
• Once the image is the way the customer wants it, they use the camera to take a picture of the scene.
• If the customer likes the photo, they can either save it on the phone, or send it via MMS directly from within the application

...

The IKEA PS made the mobile application available to consumers in three ways:

1) In-store posters urged customers to send a free text message to IKEA to receive a link to download the application.

2) Customers going to the IKEA website were able to enter their mobile number and receive a download of the application.

3) Bluetooth pillars were installed in IKEA certain stores. These would periodically sent out signals to nearby phones inviting the subscriber to download the application.

Pretty impressive right!? Take a look at these screenshots as well.


IKEA fans might have heard of the IKEA Home Planner, a desktop application that can be used to help you plan the interior desing of your new home using IKEA furniture and homeware. I recently used it when moving into my new home and must say I was very satisfied with it. One of the biggest problems was, however, having to draw out the entire room (paying attention to detail if you're short of space and wanted to make sure everything fits!). This goes some way to help with that, at the very least when you need to visualise something in your room quickly.

It is the ideal solution for people who browse through the furniture and have trouble visualising it in real space -- all they need is a picture of the room the furniture will go in, and hey presto, there it is!

It's great to be seeing one of Europe's largest brands in homeware to be so actively taking up mobile marketing techniques in order to promote its latest products.

I love the fact that they chose to distribute this mobile Augmented Reality application a number of different ways, instead of just running a more narrow campaign because this gives mobile marketing campaigns a much greater chance for success.

Also,the very choice of augmented reality is spot on. They are very hot nowadays, and look out.. I'm confident there's plenty more great examples of such apps coming our way soon.