Preserving brand meaning while changing the ritual
For decades, the IKEA experience followed a clear, linear ritual: inspiration arrived once a year through the printed catalogue, followed by a family trip to an out-of-town store, walking the showroom layout, picking flat-packs in the warehouse and taking them home.
The core brand promise—democratic design, affordability and creating a better everyday life at home—remains unchanged. What has changed fundamentally is how people move from a life-at-home need to a completed solution.
The shift to a non-linear journey
Today’s customer journey rarely begins in a car park. It often starts late in the evening on a mobile screen, moves between social video, search, digital room planners and the app, continues in an urban planning studio or a large store to test materials in person, and relies on home delivery, assembly services and ongoing CRM engagement.
The customer does not separate physical retail from digital commerce, or brand inspiration from service execution. They experience one relationship with the brand.
Addressing the "salami problem"
When customer behaviour evolves faster than internal ways of working, organisations tend to slice the customer journey into separate departmental pieces—brand campaigns, performance media, CRM, web/app experience and store communication—each measured on isolated indicators.
Our transformation focuses on connecting these disciplines into one coherent commercial system across more than 30 markets:
- Connected brand and performance: Linking upper-funnel brand storytelling around life at home with immediate digital utility, affordability proof points and commercial conversion.
- Physical and digital complementarity: Using digital platforms, data and CRM to prepare and enrich the physical store visit, while using 620+ physical locations as experiential hubs that build trust for digital commerce.
- AI-enabled workflows with human warmth: Applying data and AI to remove friction in room planning, personalisation and multi-market content adaptation, so teams can focus on empathy, home-furnishing expertise and human connection.