IKEA is a favorite brand around The Heart of Marketing. Today, we speak to its veggie balls, its Swedish meatballs, and basically everything food at IKEA.
You see, when customers come to a retailer to eat, there’s an opportunity, but it’s often hidden, especially when your brand is the size of a massive global retailer.
Let’s tell the story, and please do listen today to get all of the story’s finer details…
About a year ago, John Gregory Olson and I, Jayme Soulati, did a highly popular topic on IKEA’s launch of its veggie balls. Ohh, it was a media sensation with the Wall Street Journal managing to toss in a near full-page image of these little, unappetizing veggie balls. The story was better and it had all the necessary elements for a global media relations thrust. You can listen to that episode right here.
Since every mass retailer is looking for opportunities to engage customers better and more frequently, IKEA learned kind of by mistake how to better engage theirs. Listen in and learn how!
This is really a fascinating story because the leadership team wasn’t looking at the food experience across its brand. In fact, the food trend wasn’t even on the radar in the C-suite. IKEA leadership began to see a trend in the numbers of dinners served — 650 million in one year, which caused the light bulb to turn on brightly. That’s when they began to adopt a new approach to attracting customers, making them stick around and experience IKEA lunch and dinner.
When you think about where IKEA is located in cities across America, you know how challenging it is to get to one, right?
Take a listen and let us know about your own dining experience with IKEA!
