How IKEA approaches building and scaling a brand

How IKEA approaches building and scaling a brand

An Interview with Nina Bogstedt, IKEA Brand Identity Manager.

At the time of being interview, Nina Bogstedt is a brand identity manager for IKEA. Previously, she worked in the fashion industry for major brands like H&M.

In this interview, she shares how IKEA has developed a strong brand based on values and maintained consistent elements and trademarks even as it scales into new markets and adapts to new trends like digital shopping. She offers tips for what social entrepreneurs should focus on in the early days of establishing their own brand.
 
Can you introduce yourself and your role at IKEA?
 
NINA: I'm a brand identity manager for IKEA. I work inside IKEA and support the franchisees. Previously I was in the fashion business for around 20 years, most recently working for H&M and before that for a Swedish fashion brand Filippa K where I was the Creative Director.
 
What are your day-to-day responsibilities?
 
NINA: I have a team responsible for developing and protecting the brand. There’s a lot of brand assets including our trademarks, which are the blue and yellow brand colours for example. We also have what we call trade dress, which is what our physical and digital meeting places look like. The essence of our brand is based on our values. It’s really important to protect and develop this so we can continue having a unique brand.
 
What would you say is the most exciting part of your job?
 
NINA: I like working with products close to people in their everyday life. I also found that really fascinating when I worked with clothes. Within IKEA, you touch a lot of parts of the company by being involved in the brand because the brand is everywhere. So, I think that’s my favourite part.
 
Can you describe how IKEA thinks about branding? What are the defining characteristics?
 
NINA: Everything we do is based on values that have been around since the company started. In other places I’ve worked, these values weren’t so obvious. At IKEA the values have been stated very clearly in the Testament of the Furniture Dealer, which is a document the founder of IKEA wrote in 1976 and, interestingly, almost everything in there is still relevant today. The company is built on the idea of democratising home furnishing and siding with the many people. That has given us a lot of guidance in how to work with the brand. I would say to “be for the many” is the position we want.

Everything revolves around the product. The product is our identity. We're a very cost-conscious company and believe in simplicity. We dare to be different and a lot of that has come from the way that product is developed. That’s the foundation of the company. We also have a very clear Swedish heritage that we try to develop in different ways.

Then of course, there are also certain brand elements that customers recognise—for example, our flat pack boxes or our meatballs or the fact that our stores are blue and have a big yellow IKEA sign on them. These are the iconic trademarks that are super important to use consistently throughout time. We've got a lot to build on, which is exciting. Of course, we need to find a balance between protecting what we have and developing the brand into the future.

How do you find that balance between building upon the principles of the founder and remaining relevant as the market changes?

NINA: It comes naturally because we have constant contact with the franchisees. There’s a lot of things happening out there. For example, in the beginning IKEA was often thought of as a big store on a potato field far away from everything. The whole idea was that you could have a great day out with your family going to IKEA. You would be able to take things home with you right away, which is not something that all furniture companies can offer. Customers would build the furniture themselves to get lower prices.

Today, a lot of people shop online, and they want things delivered to their door. They might not even have the time or interest to build it themselves. Not everyone has a car. How do we tackle that? How do we find new ways to best serve our customers? Now we need to be looking at how to do an IKEA store on a smaller footprint in a smaller location.

There’s also a lot of change happening in the digital world. And that forces us to adapt in a way that’s very exciting. These are the different types of questions I’m dealing with every day. We have project groups and work groups and all kinds of different parts of IKEA coming together to try to solve these new challenges.

What are the characteristics of the IKEA brand personality? How have they been useful?

For example, a team could work for two years to build a wardrobe that uses fewer raw materials. This would be informed by the IKEA value of caring for people and planet. Our values give designers the tools and guidance on how to develop a product that’s very popular and has a smaller negative footprint on the planet by using less resources or making it lighter. So, it’s really intricate things. Our way of working is very much an IKEA trademark, but the result is what you see as a customer, which is very interesting.

How do you think about scaling the brand and adapting it to new countries or markets while also retaining some consistent elements?

NINA: The essence of IKEA is reaching people with a thinner wallet who otherwise couldn’t afford a lot of what’s out there. I think that is applicable to most of the world.

When it comes to our product range, we need to think about what a local necessity would be. For example, in a country where the humidity is high, you might need special materials. In some parts of Asia, people might live in a very small apartment with a lot of people. Then you’ll need a range of products that are functional in that type of home. Or they might want a very smart storage system designed to work in a small area.

There are visual things like colours or materials and textiles that you keep consistent, but you can start to see differences in the range of products offered in some markets. Given that we operate a franchise system, it’s up to the franchisee to position their brand in the local market, but we support them of course.

What do you give to franchisees in terms of brand guidelines? How does that work?

NINA: We have a system of guidelines that we consistently adapt to be relevant for what’s going on in the world right now. These guidelines need to address how retail is developing, how people look at brands, how people look at shopping in general, how people look at the home. We have this system of commitments. The commitments are something that we promise as a company we want to live up to. Everyone involved in IKEA commits to that.

Then we have these mandatory guidelines that are tools for the retailers and the part of IKEA developing the product range. These focus on how to position the IKEA brand within a third-party platform where you can find all kinds of different brands or they address new touchpoints, like a smaller store in Paris for example. We put a lot of time and resources into developing these guidelines and we work together with everyone in the franchises to create a shared understanding of the brand.

We also invest a lot of time and resources into collecting insights about customer behaviour and customer perceptions and how those could change. We try to follow the customers in general. It’s very important to look for correlations between where we’ve been successful and how we could do something similar in other parts of the world. There’s a lot of maintenance and investment in the brand that must be done as we expand. Because the brand is 80 years old, we also need to be adaptive.

How do you assess the strength of the brand among customers? Are there certain metrics you’re looking at? How do you know if you’ve been successful?

NINA: We have something called the Brand Capital Survey, where we measure brand perception or how happy people are with the shopping experience and the brand promise of affordable prices.

We also look for different barriers to purchasing something—are they dissatisfied with the product range or do the services around it need to be improved? We measure some things that might not seem connected to IKEA as a brand but focus on where we see the customers going in their purchasing behaviour in general which is very important—for example are they going to physical stores or digital stores.

What is the role of digital and how does that affect the maintenance of the brand?

NINA: As I mentioned, the IKEA experience was built around the idea of the customer coming to a physical store and taking the product with them from the warehouse connected to this store. They would put it in their car and take it home and build it. Of course, this experience is disrupted in a digital world where you don't go to the store and you don't necessarily pick it up yourself from the warehouse.

This has been quite a journey for IKEA, to be honest. We’re still on that journey because the cost of transporting furniture directly to the customer is very different to transporting it from a supplier to our store warehouse. We're putting a lot of effort and resources into the fulfilment part: How do you efficiently get the product from the supplier to the actual customer home?

There is a big focus on the last mile. We have ambitions to be sustainable, affordable and maintain a high service level. Then, of course, as a business you need to be cost efficient, so it's a challenge.

Also, very practically, we have a catalogue. Our physical catalogue has been very, very popular for decades. It was sent home to people in their mailbox in the area around an IKEA store. The idea was that people would look at this and get inspired to go shopping.

Now the importance of the catalogue is vastly decreasing year by year. It used to be a very reliable commercial tool. We would know that if a certain product was placed on a specific page of the catalogue, it would multiply sales by a thousand percent or something. It was incredible. There used to be a joke that if we put something on a page in the catalogue, we would have to open a new factory because we’d sell so many. We don’t have that in the same way anymore because in a digital environment you don’t have the same kind of sales steering.
 
So, there’s a lot of things that must be considered. It’s not just how to fulfil the actual orders but also how to steer the flow of sales and also to plan for production.

If social entrepreneurs are thinking about building a distinct brand for their own companies, what should they start with?
 
NINA: I think consistency in visual aspect is very important. It doesn’t have to be complicated, but you just need some consistency to build recognition.

Then, I think for brands today it's very important to have a clear storyline. Not just a business idea, but a point of view. You need to share this story and engage with people and be personal because I don’t think people are so interested in brands anymore. I don’t think they have quite the same draw that they used to have. That’s my personal opinion.

People are more interested in other people in a sense, and so your company needs to be personal and be sharing who’s behind the brand. Have that storyline and make it authentic and true. Be able to tell it and have a point of view based on values. That is very helpful, and I can also see how that really helped IKEA. Without that strong sense of our values, I don’t think IKEA would be here today.
 
The product or whatever you’re selling should always be in the centre of your company. Without that, the customer will not come back. But the branding elements cannot be neglected. I think it’s very wise to just start in a simple way.

Have you ever seen any practical exercises that a team or entrepreneur can go through to develop their brand if they’re totally new to this?
 
NINA: For me, it’s very helpful to put myself in the customer’s shoes and see things from the customer’s perspective because sometimes we tend to see things from the inside and think everything will be self-explanatory. From inside a company, you might think everyone will understand and find your offering really good and important. But maybe from the outside, it's not at all.
 
So, for an exercise, bring in some people not involved in what you’re doing and stress test your idea on someone else. Using the customer’s point of view usually helps you find what’s important and what you should do first and what’s crucial.

Then I would focus a bit on the emotional connection of your customer to the brand. Don't get lost in logos or fonts or whatever. Instead, really think about the personal emotional connection to whatever you’re doing and work that into the customer journey.
 
A lot of people tend to want to have everything figured out before they start. My advice is to try and test and evaluate instead. Otherwise, you might spend a lot of time in vain creating things in the abstract and think you really have everything covered. Test things out in a small-scale way and then evaluate. I think that’s a much better and easier way to get going so you don’t get stuck in the beginning.

This interview was done as of IKEA as part of the IKEA Social Entrepreneurship and Acumen East Africa Accelerator in 2020.

All use, reproduction and distribution of this work is subject to a CC-BY-NC-ND license.