IKEA’s Social Media Listening & Monitoring Initiatives
| Case Code: ITSY082 Case Length: 12 Pages Period: 2009 - 2015 Pub Date: 2015 Teaching Note: Available |
Price: Rs.300 Organization: IKEA Industry: Furniture Retail Countries: Europe; US; Global Themes: Social Media Listening, Social Media Monitoring, Business Intelligence, Marketing Research |
Abstract Case Intro 1 Case Intro 2 Excerpts
Introduction
In December 2011, IKEA launched “The Big Sleepover” happy to bed campaign in the UK. According to IKEA, its team had uncovered a group on Facebook called “I want to have a sleepover in IKEA”. The group was started by IKEA fans and identification of the fan group was the seed for the campaign. IKEA wanted its customers to look at the company not only as a furniture retailer but also as a brand that guided customers at every step of the redesigning and furnishing process while creating an ideal haven and helping them go “happy to bed”. IKEA developed a fully integrated plan for the “Big Sleepover” at the Lakeside IKEA store in the UK for its customers. The campaign was broadcast online, on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube), and across print media and was considered a huge success.
Industry observers felt that by monitoring social media, IKEA had benefited through fact based decision making, sales recovery, waste reduction, and opportunity identification to avoid potential public relation crises. IKEA’s stated business concept was “It is all about finding simple solutions and saving on every method, process, or approach adopted – but not on ideas.” IKEA stated that it had turned to social media to discover who was talking about it, what was being talked about, and which product was being talked about, and to begin the process of social media listening. According to Hans Gartner (Gartner), Digital Development team, Inter IKEA systems, IKEA understood the value of listening to social media to understand customer experiences, opinions, and demographics. He also observed that the relevant social media data was not always communicated to other departments. So, IKEA teamed up with “The Socializers" to speed up the social listening process by setting up the Listening Hub in 2014 at Inter IKEA Systems Headquarters in the Netherlands. According to Gartner, "The Vizia/Brandwatch Listening Hub at Inter IKEA Systems allows key IKEA stakeholders to gain fuller insight into global conversations about the brand. The Brandwatch analytics platform provides senior stakeholders with an effective planning tool for multiple silos and regions."
While some industry observers lauded IKEA’s social monitoring initiatives, others felt that the company had to overcome many challenges to make these initiatives more effective. Gartner himself admitted that many challenges lay ahead for IKEA in relation to social media monitoring. These related to big data impact, data analysis, and IKEA’s corporate structure. Data from many websites needed to be extracted and compiled as IKEA had separate pages for each of the countries in which it operated. Further, it had a product range of around 9500 products, which meant filtering the mentions and tagging of products was also a challenge.
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