With Discover the Originals, we took advantage of IKEA’s fame and pop cultural status. Their weird sounding product names has become this mythical phenomenon. What no-one outside of Sweden knew, was that a lot of the names belong to wonderful Swedish places. So, we decided to reclaim the names. By showing where IKEA’s product names actually originate from, we were able to present lots of Swedish tourism destinations in an entertaining and news-worthy way. And as the cherry on top we launched a new, official tourism slogan for the beautiful lake Bolmen (that gave name to an IKEA toilet brush).

Visit Sweden has a clear but challenging objective: with extremely limited funds, create global awareness about, and interest in, Sweden as a destination. This means that a campaign not only has to present appealing locations, but also be so interesting that media all over the world picks up the story. For this campaign, it was also important that we presented locations all across Sweden.

The campaign started with a big event by lake Bolmen, where we unveiled the lake’s new, official slogan. The event was hosted by local politicians and drew both residents and media. In the film we told the story about how IKEA had stolen names from Swedish places and showed several destinations. Both activities were distributed through a press release. The campaign also had digital assets.

The results exceeded everyone’s expectations. The campaign generated more than 700 articles and 300 blog posts in 49 countries, with a potential organic reach of 2,1 billion. The story was covered by news-, travel-, lifestyle- and design media, including CNN, BBC, The Fast Company, Lonely Planet, Le Figaro, Independent, Forbes, Elle Decoration, Apartment Therapy and De Standaard. The impact was also reflected on visitsweden.com, where ”average time on page” increased with 82 %, to 7,49 min. 

The few native articles we had performed really well, a proof that consumers really engaged with the story. ”Number of readers” exceeded the goals with 148 % and dwell time was 176 % over benchmark. The paid views for the 15 s versions also performed extremely well and beat benchmark on most points. For example, in the UK the completion rate was 88 % (benchmark 70 %).

All measurable results show that the campaign had great impact on both media and consumers.

IKEA is one of the world’s biggest companies, known pretty much everywhere. Heck, IKEA is probably more famous than Sweden. The company and their mythical product names have been used for entertainment in stand-up comedy, memes, movies and talkshows such as Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon and the Ellen Show. IKEA is simply part of pop culture.