IKEA has been known to use unique campaigns to evoke emotions among their customers and spread word-of-mouth. You might remember their “U up?” campaign from a few months ago. They messaged followers with an online status in the middle of the night, offering them a free mattress in case they reply immediately. Or you might remember our article on the IKEA Spain campaign which allowed customers to get product recommendations in order to enhance their sleep. And these campaigns worked wonders.
Now, IKEA is back with another dreamy campaign. IKEA Canada and the creative agency Rethink are tapping into the subconscious mind to promote mattresses, through an experiment. They decided to drop influencers, and move away from the AI scripted reviews – and let the actual customers do the talking.
Geoff Bailie, group creative director at Rethink commented that going into the shoot, they had no idea what will be captured but that “In the end it was that authenticity of the real sleep talkers that helped this campaign come to life in an interesting and insightful way.”
What these teams did is they invited real sleep talkers to try out their mattresses in mock up rooms at their store sites and they recorded the results. “We captured real, unscripted moments to show–quite literally–how comfortable our mattresses are,” said Jonelle Ricketts, head of marketing at IKEA Canada in a statement.
Throughout the process over 90 hours of footage has been collected, and the final campaign resulted in a 60 second campaign video that captured all of the raw, deep sleep emotions – all unfiltered and genuine. As the brand said, the Sleep Talk Reviews campaign spoke for itself and is not stopping only at the video format, but is actually found across radios, Spotify, and even billboards.
With this campaign IKEA once again showed the importance of establishing a connection with your consumers, as well as the importance of authenticity in the day where media, and for this case reviews, are full of edited, AI or even fake reviews that ultimately push customers away.
