IKEA Steps Up Its Mobile Marketing
Written on Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Following on from last December's post for the IKEA Mobile Bluetooth Marketing campaign, I have just come across more relevant news about the Swedish homeware retail giant, releasing its 2010 catalogue as an iPhone app.
As a big IKEA fan, I have been waiting for this ever since I got my iPhone, and was a bit disappointed this wasn't available at the time. There was only a spanish version of the catalogue, which was, however, limited, and only available in Spanish.
So a couple of days ago I came across this post, reporting that not only has IKEA released its 2010 catalogue as an iPhone app, but that there is also an augmented reality feature that allows you to overlay IKEA furniture in your own home space (through the use of the iPhone camera), so that you can have a better view of how it would fit (much like their previous mobile application). Here's more from the article:
Mobile marketing agency Mobile Dreams Factory has brought the 2010 IKEA catalogue to the iPhone with a unique augmented reality feature: Users can select a piece of furniture from the catalogue and place it anywhere inside the room around them, changing its size to fit the perspective by using the phone’s camera.
“Every year IKEA launches their printed catalogue,” said Alberto Benbunan, managing director of Mobile Dreams Factory, Madrid. “Last year, IKEA launched an iPhone app together with the press release of the printed catalogue.
“That increased the notoriety of IKEA and this specific press release,” he said. “The target demographic of the app is the same as IKEA’s in general—mainly women ages 25-44—but in the app we found that we all are fans of IKEA. Hundreds of thousands of applications were downloaded in Spain and across Europe.”
IKEA ramps up mobile initiatives
The IKEA application has been downloaded more than 200,000 times and in the first week of its release became the second most downloaded application in Apple’s App Store.
The mobile marketing campaign developed by the Spanish agency Mobile Dreams Factory to promote the application won the Golden Lion at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival for best advertising campaign on mobile devices.
Gartner estimates that mobile advertising and marketing could grow by 80 percent this year alone and might reach $10 billion.
IKEA realised a couple of years ago that it had to jump on board or miss the boat.
For summer 2008, IKEA launched a mobile loyalty program to build a database of consumers interested in receiving discounts from the home furnishings retailer. The text-to-enter loyalty program is a means for IKEA to start a dialogue with interested consumers. BCode powered the texted discounts (see story).
When IKEA Seattle launched a mobile loyalty program to build a database of people interested in receiving discounts, the home furnishing retailer never even imagined that 23,000 consumers would sign-up (see story).
IKEA also leverages the mobile platform to reach consumers via advertisements, contests, a customer-relationship management program, coupons and a WAP shopping site.
IKEA’s Seattle store has been running a monthly mobile contest giving opted-in consumers the chance to win a $500 IKEA gift card. The Seattle store also features a mobile club offering customers savings and special offers to encourage loyalty. The mobile site serves almost as a shopping assistant (see story).
Augmented realityThe IKEA iPhone application is free, and while there is no in-application payments mechanism in this version, the application is designed to increase retail sales. Consumers can use the augmented reality feature to try out the furniture before buying.
The application also serves as a branding tool that drives consumers into bricks-and-mortar retail stores.“The hundreds of thousands of downloads of this app in only few months were thanks to word of mouth, blogs and media that echoed the story,” Mr. Benbunan said. “The unique augmented reality features of this application made it the number-one most downloaded app in many European countries,” he said.
I then saw the following presentation video about the iPhone app, that shows a live demo of how the app working.
Needless to say I was very excited and impressed after all this and immediately turned to iTunes to download the app. I found the "IKEA 2010 Catalogue", and though somewhat surprised the screenshots were different from the video, I proceeded to download.
I ended up, to cut a long story short, with a nice iPhone-specific version of the IKEA UK catalogue (see screenshot below). Which is nice. Really. I would have been really pleased with this, had I not seen this video. But no interactivity for me. No augmented reality. No quiz for my personal style. And thus, an overall :( feeling...
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| Screenshots from the IKEA 2010 UK catalogue, available here in Greece. No augmented reality... :( |
I can only presume the Interactive Catalogue is only available in Spain, and perhaps also some other European countries, but it is nowhere to be seen here in Greece. I hope it will be also available here soon... Please?
Posted in
iPhone,
mobile marketing
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