Marketing Case Study: IKEA Cat Video

Ikea is a company that purports itself to be transparent and cares about people, the environment, and even withdraws products for sale if they find out poor treatment of workers or other problems have occurred within their manufacturing process. This is serious stuff. But, they decided to put out a commercial that was less serious — pure fluff. You know, the kitty kind. And, if there is one thing we have learned, the Internet loves to share cat videos!

URL of video: https://youtu.be/Z7vXP3tHzhA
Landing Page: http://facebook.com/ikeacats
Placement: Their website and YouTube.com, then shared on all social media.

Wanting to bring the fun back to furniture, IKEA brilliantly found a way to mix people’s favorite pastime, watching kitties on YouTube, with a commercial for their products. They use the commercial to tell the world about their new tagline: Happy Inside. The thing they did best was to combine something already popular with something comparatively boring: furniture shopping. Then, they did one better. They released the “making of” video, which turned out to be even more popular. Thus, the video serves to get even more views and more eyes on their name, increasing brand awareness and associating their company with happiness.

What they did right: They combined something people already like with their product. Then, they extended the success by releasing the “making of” to get more brand awareness and drive new people back to the original video. They also held contests associated with the video to increase engagement.

Improvements: The only thing IKEA could have done better is add a baby. Their branding is straight up awesome on this project.