Social Media DownUnder: contest, points drive Ikea kitchen sales
(Editor’s note: this guest post is by Rory Mackay of Websitetips.com.au. It was geo-limited but has great ideas to inspire for other markets and projects. “Seeding” is the perfect metaphor — a concept sown into social media that sprouts all kinds of creative activity by fans and their friends.)
The My Kitchen Sucks campaign run by IKEA in Australia has set a cracking pace in the first two weeks. The brief that Thinq (digital agency) worked around was ‘Drive kitchen sales over a period of 2 months’. The target group was women who were in the market for a new kitchen. A restriction on the campaign was that the message should only be available in two Australian cities (franchise ruling).
What Thinq did was turn the tables on the campaign. They knew that buying a kitchen is not an instantaneous decision but they knew that they could influence that decision. Along the way they would pick up impulse shoppers, raise brand awareness and create buzz.
Brainstorming campaign ideas, it was decided instead of selling the virtues of IKEA kitchens that they would let IKEA kitchen buyers talk about themselves and their kitchens. Let them let it all hang out, the good the bad and the ugly. The problem was managing negative comments which are always a huge headache and worry for management, and this campaign had the potential to open IKEA to a lot of negativity.
The trick was to channel this negative feedback into something positive. What they came up with was a social competition that allowed people to show how bad their kitchen really is. The winner which would be voted upon would then win a new installed kitchen from IKEA. The clincher concept to the campaign was ‘don’t give people a chance to win, ask them to earn it’.
The voting mechanism setup was built along a points system which people earned as they shared their kitchen with their friends. As people share their terrible kitchen so they gathered points and the person with the most points wins a new installed kitchen. Points are earned for submissions that are shared across Twitter and Facebook.
Two weeks into the campaign:
- Facebook has become the number one referrer site.
- Customers have setup their own viral campaigns.
- The campaign is currently earning $60,000 a week for IKEA.
- Over 1,100 kitchens were submitted in the first week.
- Thousands of tagged kitchen images pointing back to the competition.
- The leading kitchen has received over 800 votes.
One of the great things about this campaign was the small budget. Beside production costs of the real estate only AU$4000 was spent in seeding the competition. This was done via two bought email lists, which received one blast each.
Some user generated viral things people are doing to earn their new kitchen are …
