IKEA Taiwan

Life can be better with IKEA

The leading home furnishing brand IKEA’s “Bring Freshness to Life” is a recent success of viral marketing. The promotional YouTube video generated a record high online interest for IKEA Taiwan, over 12000 likes, 1800 shares and 300 active comments through a single seasonal campaign needed to remember the nature of relatively smaller market in Taiwan.

The campaign features how IKEA’s dinning and decoration products can provide phenomenal new dinning experience for one of the most traditional food stands “Ay-Chung Flour-Rice Noodle” in Taiwan. Traditionally, food stands in Asia are famous for their economical and delicious local food, but not for their service quality, dinning experience, not to mention that people won’t be willing to spend 30 mins to an hour to dine with friends and family and enjoy the food under the humid, low quality dinning environment.

IKEA captures the radical contrast successfully by setting up a comfy, elegant, cater-to-family-style of dinner table in front of the “Ay-Chung Flour-Rice Noodle” stand and recording people’s reaction and response. “Surprisingly, the food tasted better today,” shared by one of the event participants. “Even the simplest food can be elegant, I feel like I am eating at home.” By setting up a one-day consumer event inviting customers to dine with Ay-Chung and IKEA and create a viral video followed by Facebook and YouTube promotion, the campaign created word-of-mouth effect and great PR value online and offline.

The campaign is catchy and contagious by capturing the elements of “story, emotion, and trigger.” By selecting one of the oldest, memory-of-all-times food stands in Taiwan to partner, IKEA created the transformation of the dinning experience which easily resonated with people. The campaign created emotions by recording and sharing the happy smiles, surprised faces, and moments of awe of the event participants. Lastly, the comparison between Ay-Chung’s traditional dinning experience, people stand in front of the store sweating and quickly finishing the noodles, and IKEA’s chill, relax, family-oriented dinning experience created great expressive tension.