IKEA: Layout Article

Professor: Ikea is successful because store layout like a maze

London - A UK professor claims retail outlet Ikea is so attractive to shoppers because its floor design is maze-like and confuses shoppers. He adds, "The way to the exit is always behind you."

Alan Penn, director of the Virtual Reality Centre for the Built Environment at University College London, concludes Ikea confuses their customers "into submission by designing their stores like a maze," the Scotsman reports. The iconic yellow paths turns customers into disoriented shoppers, who end up buying things they may not need, Penn says.

"It is so well done and so cunningly done that I have little doubt that it is intentional," he told the Scotsman.

As the Local reports, customers are forced to walk through the entire store before they can leave.

The Daily Mail reports Penn saying: "Also you're directed through their marketplace area where a staggering amount of purchases are impulse buys, things like light bulbs or a cheap casserole that you weren't planning on getting."

Penn believes Sweden-based Ikea has a calculated strategy to make shoppers spend more, similar to what supermarkets try to accomplish. "They couldn't get away with having shoppers going in one single route like Ikea, so what they do is put popular purchases like milk and bread at the far end of the store so you have to walk past shelves of other products on the way."

The Telegraph quotes an Ikea spokeswoman who denied that its store layouts were designed to baffle customers.

She said: "Our furniture showrooms are designed to give our customers lots of ideas for every area of the home including your kitchen, bedroom and living room."

Ikea has 283 stores in 26 countries and raked in profits of $3.6 billion last year.

http://digitaljournal.com/article/302879

IKEA: Creative Advertising

The most creative IKEA advertising campaigns from all over the world.

IKEA Sofa Billboard

To show that IKEA furniture could fit in pretty much every home, an IKEA sofa was hung in front of a billboard in Amsterdam. [link]

IKEA Newspaper Ad

Creative “Sliding Doors” IKEA newspaper advertising from Australia. [link]

IKEA Park Bench

Real park bench was decorated with items sold at IKEA stores. [link]

IKEA Balcony

IKEA redesigned the front of a whole apartment building in one of the busiest streets in Frankfurt with giant mock-ups of IKEA drawers. [link]

IKEA Fashion

IKEA Billboard

Cool IKEA billboard reminds us to decorate for the holidays. [link]

IKEA Delivery Service

Clever advertising for free home delivery from IKEA in Germany. [link]

IKEA Apartment In a Box

Creative advertising campaign for the IKEA Brooklyn store opening.

IKEA Cinema Catalogue

To promote new IKEA catalogue, DDB Berlin directed the people’s attention to the IKEA products in popular movies with a clever trick. [link]

IKEA Tool Belt

IKEA Messy Bus Shelters

Glass wall of the bus shelters have been filled with kitchen objects creating a real mess. At the bottom, sticker showed IKEA’s answer to chaos in the kitchen. [link]

IKEA World’s Biggest Rack

Existing architecture of the south train station in Vienna was converted into a giant rack filled with new IKEA products. [link]

IKEA Bus Stop

Real sofa from IKEA was placed in a bus stop shelter in Istanbul. [link]

Moving IKEA Living Room

Ceative living room on wheels filled with IKEA products. [link]

IKEA Staircase

Store’s main staircase was presented as a chest of drawers, with everything inside neatly organized. [link]

IKEA Train in Japan

Kobe Monorail train was converted into a moving IKEA showroom. [link]

http://www.toxel.com/inspiration/2010/01/12/clever-and-creative-ikea-advertising/

IKEA: Mother Advertising Campaigns

http://www.motherlondon.com

IKEA: Naming

Product names [edit]

Lighting department in a Russian IKEA store, showing item names in Russian.

IKEA products are identified by single word names. Most of the names are Scandinavian in origin. Although there are some notable exceptions, most product names are based on a special naming system developed by IKEA.^[28]

• Upholstered furniture, coffee tables, rattan furniture, bookshelves, media storage, doorknobs: Swedish placenames (for example: Klippan)
• Beds, wardrobes, hall furniture: Norwegian place names
• Dining tables and chairs: Finnish place names
• Bookcase ranges: Occupations
• Bathroom articles: Scandinavian lakes, rivers and bays
• Kitchens: grammatical terms, sometimes also other names
• Chairs, desks: men's names
• Fabrics, curtains: women's names
• Garden furniture: Swedish islands
• Carpets: Danish place names
• Lighting: terms from music, chemistry, meteorology, measures, weights, seasons, months, days, boats, nautical terms
• Bedlinen, bed covers, pillows/cushions: flowers, plants, precious stones
• Children's items: mammals, birds, adjectives
• Curtain accessories: mathematical and geometrical terms
• Kitchen utensils: foreign words, spices, herbs, fish, mushrooms, fruits or berries, functional descriptions
• Boxes, wall decoration, pictures and frames, clocks: colloquial expressions, also Swedish place names

For example, DUKTIG (meaning: good, well-behaved) is a line of children's toys, OSLO is a name of a bed, BILLY (a Swedish masculine name) is a popular bookcase, DINERA (meaning: (to) dine) for tableware, KASSETT (meaning: cassette) for media storage. One range of office furniture is named EFFEKTIV (meaning: efficient, effective),SKÄRPT (meaning: sharp or clever) is a line of kitchen knives.

A notable exception is the IVAR shelving system, which dates back to the early 1970s. This item is named after the item's designer.

Some of IKEA's Swedish product names have amusing or unfortunate connotations in other languages, sometimes resulting in the names being withdrawn in certain countries. Notable examples for English include the "Jerker" computer desk (discontinued several years ago as of 2013), "Fukta" plant spray, "Fartfull" workbench,^[29] and "Lyckhem" (meaning bliss). Kitchen legs are called FAKTUM (called AKURUM in the United States). The latest addition is the new "Askholmen" outdoor suite. Similar blunders happen with other multinational companies.^[30]

Company founder Ingvar Kamprad, who is dyslexic, found that naming the furniture with proper names and words, rather than a product code, made the names easier to remember.^[31] IKEA uses a sales technique called "bulla bulla" in which a bunch of items are purposefully jumbled in bins, to create the impression of volume, and therefore, inexpensiveness.^[9]

IKEA: Digital recreations

Ikea Uses Fake, Digitally Created Rooms Inside Its Catalog

When you're flipping through the IKEA catalog and wondering how they make all that easy-to-assemble furniture look so good inside that lovely apartment, know this: it's fake. As in, it doesn't exist. As in, it was made on a computer by a 3D graphic artist.

According to the WSJ, 12% of IKEA pictures—catalog, web, brochure—were made digitally. The furniture giant expects that number to increase to 25% next year. Why are they making fake photos instead of constructing elaborate sets with pristine lighting conditions and ace photographers? Well, as you can imagine, the old way got too expensive. Faking it on a computer is much cheaper.

It's funny, IKEA's whole mock 3D design didn't start until 2005 when three interns were tasked to creating an image of an IKEA product without using a camera. It took them a year, but they figured it out and IKEA has been incorporating more and more digital renders in each catalog.

IKEA has been getting better at faking the funk though: the graphic artists work with a traditional studio's crew to help make the images "more real". For example, they would work with a carpenter to digitally age a door or add fingerprints to a surface to make it look lived-in. What the IKEA graphic artists can't yet master is food, so the apartments typically look completely empty. Check out these images to see if you can tell what's real (they're both fake).

And here's what the designers do, behind the scenes:

IKEA publishes 208 million catalogs a year (more than double the amount of Bibles, apparently) and I'm guessing very few people know they're looking at rooms that don't exist. But look at that side table! Only 19 bucks!

http://gizmodo.com/5937803/ikea-uses-fake-digitally-created-rooms-inside-its-catalog

IKEA: References

IKEA: Location

Analysis: IKEA and its location

IKEA @ the Tampines Retail Park

IKEA is known for its large shopping space, an even bigger self-serve warehouse area and the numerous products it showcases in the 2-storey store. Space has always been an integral part of IKEA’s success and with the building of the IKEA Tampines flagship store, it gives a whole new meaning to space and provides consumers endless opportunites and ideas to build the perfect home.

IKEA has taken advantage of the Economic Development Board’s Warehouse Retail Scheme, which lets companies use industrial land for retail and warehousing. Its new flagship store is located at Tampines North Drive 2, beside a wafer fabrication plant. This new location is termed the Tampines Retail Park, which houses Giant and Courts as well. The use of space here can thus be related to Michel de Certeau’s idea of tactics and strategy. While the land around Tampines North is typically catered to industrial plants and a nearby Civil Defence fire station (strategy), the concept of using the land for a mega centre of consumption provides a form of tactic to take advantage of the opportunites that the huge amount of space serves.

However, despite the inclusion of Giant and Courts, IKEA still attracts more than 300,000 consumers per month since its opening in November 2006. While some may feel that the new store is less accessible than the one at Alexandra, the larger space that is available at Tampines provides a pulling factor for both new and existing customers, and keeps them coming in. Space and its usage by IKEA have thus been carefully constructed and used, and in this way, have become key factors for IKEA’s economic success.

   

IKEA Tampines as a mega retail centre

As a place of consumption and consumerism situated in a space meant for industrial production, there is thus a tension between what the space at Tampines was meant for, and what it has been used for. However, IKEA has come up with several concepts to make use of the massive space they have, that successfully distracts the consumer from this tension. Due to the massive industrial land space that is allocated for retail, IKEA has come up with several new concepts to take advantage of this space. This includes 1,400 parking lots, coupled with a free entrance for those driving in. The lots are widely maximised, with ample space for families with prams or wheelchairs. This new feature in the Tampines store that was previously not available at Alexandra gives shoppers the freedom to browse IKEA’s products and showrooms for as long as they want without worrying about parking fees and queueing up for a parking lot.

With thousands of consumers streaming in every month, IKEA is indeed a space built for human flux. With its location in a heartland area between Pasir Ris and Tampines HDB estates, the movement of shoppers in IKEA reflects those in the suburban estates. At all times of the day, IKEA sees shoppers moving in and out of the store by cars, its shuttle service, or even by foot. The structure of IKEA thus conforms to this idea of mass movement of consumers – externally, as discussed above, as well as internally, which will be elaborated upon in the next page.

The idea of space here provides a whole new dimension to furniture shopping. The location of IKEA Tampines in itself provides a competitive edge by making full use of the available land space and converting these as benefits for the consumers. If before, only factory workers and industrialists flock the area for work purposes, now the area has been transformed to a mass area for consumption, and the new IKEA flagship store there has provided consumers with a new and refreshing feel that is not possible at Alexandra.

IKEA: Constructed Space

Analysis: IKEA as a constructed space

While IKEA presents the message that its customer’s visit to the store is a leisurely walkabout to look at furniture at the customer’s own pace and direction, the customer’s experience in the store is guided and directed from the moment the customer approaches the store until the moment the customer leaves.

As mentioned earlier, the surrounding landscape is mostly undeveloped and there are no other mega-structures, save for Courts and Giant Hypermart, to distract the customer from the massive blue building that is the IKEA showroom and store. The building is instantly recognisable with the IKEA name in yellow, in huge block letters, on top of the blue building. The immense size of the building leads the customer to believe that IKEA is indeed a giant in home furnishing and that they would be able to find everything that they need for their home under the roof of IKEA.

The movement of the consumer throughout the store is also guided by the signs in the store and by the paths that lead seamlessly from one showroom to another, which makes the consumer feel that he or she is merely drifting from one room to another in a real house, when in fact, the constant presence of arrows on the ground and maps all over the store guide consumers through the store in a manner that has been carefully planned and orchestrated.    

It is as if the consumer is placed on an invisible conveyer belt which makes the viewer visit each and every showroom that IKEA has to offer, moving from the living room to the dining room to the kitchen and to the bedroom. While the consumer has the choice of whether or not to stop at any of the smaller showrooms, the route that the consumer takes has already been planned for him or her. This leaves the consumer with actual little choice of direction throughout the store. IKEA’s management has, of course, provided short-cuts for consumers who are in a hurry. However, the consumer is made to go through other showrooms, as well as the self-serve furniture section before he or she is able to exit the store. The same conveyor belt movement is also present in the cafeteria, where customers have to go through a winding queue which leads them from appetizer to entrée to dessert stations, before they can finally pay for their food.

    

IKEA presents the illusion of the availability of choice to its consumers, allowing them to customise their furniture with different lacquers or mixing and matching different pieces to create a customised wardrobe or kitchen. At the same time, there are no salespeople around the store to harass the consumer into buying a certain piece of furniture. By doing this, IKEA places the agency on the consumer and makes them believe that their experience and choices in the store are theirs to determine. However, this is not the case as everything the consumer experiences, from walking through the showrooms to buying food, to buying actual pieces of furniture, is influenced by the way IKEA is constructed. Thus, there is, in actuality, little choice for the consumer as there is very minimal difference between the pieces of furniture on sale. Adorno and Horkheimer argue how mass production has led to little actual individuality or what they succintly term “pseudo-individuality”. The same goes for IKEA. Despite the fact that consumers can choose a variety of table-tops and table legs, they are essentially buying the same table. The ability to customise their furniture is limited to superficial aspects such as the material of the table-tops. The agency that is placed upon consumers blind them to the fact that their ability to choose is limited to superficial aspects and that there are many others, probably numbering in the thousands or even more, who own the same object.

        

In addition, IKEA sells itself as a place where consumers can be inspired and get new ideas on how to decorate their houses, furthering the illusion consumers have of IKEA as a place that allows them agency and individualism. However, the fact of the matter is that the ideas for home decoration are generated by IKEA, thus, in reality, there is hardly a choice that the consumer makes independently or individualistically, although they do not realise this. IKEA is thus not just a highly constructed space, but also one that presents a reality that is not a true representation of the real, as will be elaborated upon in the next page.

IKEA: Hyperreal Space

Analysis: IKEA as a hyperreal space

IKEA is a classic example of Jean Baudrillard’s theories of simulation and hyperreality. IKEA’s use of deliberately constructed and designed showroom ‘sets’ simulate an idea of a perfect home, and although consumers are aware that they are in a place of consumption and consumerism, the illusion created by IKEA is effective in lulling consumers into a state where they forget that the setting is part of IKEA’s marketing strategy. In this way IKEA can be viewed as a third order simulacrum, presenting an image, which though not a true representation of reality, behaves as if the imaginary and abstract real that has been produced through connotation is the real.

One way this is achieved is by dedicating about 5900m2 to displaying showrooms that simulate this home setting. The consumer is thus literally surrounded by images of cosiness and warmth, leading the consumer to believe that IKEA is not selling a product or a piece of furniture but a possible life, and the constant repetition of this visual further reinforces the effect.

   

IKEA displays itself not as a shop dedicated to consumerism but as a place where consumers can get ideas for decorating and styling their own, perfect home, masking it’s real purpose behind a façade of warmth and relaxation, presenting an illusion or a simulation of the real, and at the same time, by denying that element of falsity, becomes a third order simulation.
Although it is not immediately evident, IKEA’s environment is one that is highly constructed and carefully planned, with every piece of furniture chosen to create a certain effect. An excellent example is the children’s section at IKEA. Bright colours, cartoon motifs and toys to spark the imagination dominate the design in this part of the store, with occasional toys strewn on the floor to simulate a child’s room.

In addition to what the consumer sees in IKEA, close attention is also paid to what the consumer does not see: there is a distinct lack of signs that instruct the consumer not to sit or rest on the beds or sofas, further enhancing the illusion of IKEA as a replica of a perfect home. Every detail in the use of space within IKEA thus contributes to the general effect created, and this simulation is so convincing that IKEA thus functions as a third order simulacrum.

The presence of partitions in IKEA is another element that enhances the illusion created in IKEA. IKEA’s use of partitions to enclose the numerous showroom ‘sets’ is a key element that differentiates it from other furniture stores, which typically feature a more open concept, with different areas of a house—such as the living room, bedroom and so on—featured on raised platforms, without any partitions. In this way, the showrooms in IKEA have a sense of privacy that further adds to the sense of being in a real home, adding to the illusion created by IKEA that the store—a very public space dedicated to consumerism—is representative of a home—a very private domain.

Lighting is another aspect of IKEA’s interior that is carefully controlled and manipulated, not merely to enhance the aesthetic appeal of the products, but also to create a comfortable and cosy ambience. The lack of bright spotlights and the use, instead, of ceiling lights and lamps, are all deliberate choices, made for a specific reason: to simulate a home setting.

IKEA not only creates an image of a perfect, ideal home—a simulation—but is so successful in creating that illusion that many consumers do not realise that what they are experiencing in IKEA is an illusion, and it is thus that IKEA is not just a replica of reality, but a replica that denies it’s simulated-ness, and, more importantly, a replica that consumers do not recognise is a replica. In this way, IKEA is, undoubtedly, a third order simulacrum.

 

The idyll perfection of the world created within IKEA has no real reference in reality, especially in terms of what is connoted. Subtle ‘human touches’ scattered around the showroom displays imply a happy, ideal lifestyle that IKEA wants the consumer to believe is a possible reality if they buy IKEA furniture, but this reality is in fact, hyperreality.

http://ikeaism.wordpress.com