IKEA’s Genius Marketing Strategy: Lessons for Building an Extraordinary Brand
A furniture store had opened up in Hyderabad which resulted in such a massive traffic jam that a person who would usually take just 20 minutes to go from office to home took about more than 4 hours just because of this traffic jam. This brand is none other than the world’s largest furniture seller which goes by the name IKEA. The entire city of Hyderabad was in a frenzy and the furniture store itself put out a billboard saying that ‘’Hyderabad we are here to stay’’.
General Mills came out with the idea of minimizing the effort that mothers were putting into baking a cake. The product minimized the efforts of the mothers to such a large extent that a process that would usually take more than a day sometimes would be done in less than half a day. But you know what? This product failed miserably in the market. The psychologists of General Mills concluded that about leads to love. And this is exactly the phenomenon that IKEA applied to its furniture because of which today IKEA is a $40B company. While conventional furniture comes in pieces and you have to assemble the furniture in your own house. This is where the concept of DIY- Do it yourself comes into play.
IKEA furniture did not come assembled they came in a box and you could stack one box on top of the other as a result of which the volume occupancy of the truck was maximized. In one mini truck, you could practically ship more than 3–4 sofas. And that is how the entire supply chain became super efficient. And it doesn’t stop over here. And there are also some extraordinary business lessons that you need to learn to build an extraordinary brand. the perceived value of a product is always directly proportional to the engagement of the customers. No matter what kind of a brand you are if you can engage with your customers that will help you create an extraordinary sense of brand value in the mind of your customers. This sense could be the deciding factor to decide whether your company is an ordinary company or an extraordinary company.
