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Face Off: IKEA wants to stimulate the entire furniture segment says Ulf Smedberg, country marketing manager, IKEA India

The world-famous furniture company, which has been sourcing from India for the last 28 years, is all set to open its first store in Hyderabad in 2017.

The world-famous furniture company, which has been sourcing from India for the last 28 years, is all set to open its first store in Hyderabad in 2017. IKEA has drawn up a long-term plan to open 25 stores in the country over the coming years. Mirroring the features offered in global IKEA stores, like restaurants and kids’ play areas, the Swedish major plans to helps Indians style their homes affordably, says IKEA’s Ulf Smedberg in an interview to BrandWagon’s Meghna Sharma. Excerpts…

IKEA is known for its strong content strategy globally. What will be your content strategy in India with reference to your catalogue, social media, the works?

The catalogues are an integral part of IKEA. In India too we will have our catalogue, but about 10% of the catalogue will have pictures depicting Indian homes. We want people to look at the catalogue and say, “Wow, I want my home to look like this.” Giving solutions is what we will focus on through our catalogue. If a person has a problem with the kitchen, then they can find solutions here. It will be based on the homes we have visited in the past.

Our main TG is young couples in urban cities but we won’t limit ourselves to that. We will also cater to families with children and young newly-married couples setting up their houses. It will be more skewed towards women as in India, they are the ones who take care of the house and take major decisions about the interiors.

No two homes are similar in India. How will IKEA’s ‘standardised homes’ concept work here?

We sought to look at India from a micro angle — income, demographics, how people live etc. We give a lot of importance to understanding the market. We want to learn how people live in their homes, what activities they indulge in at home, what their wardrobes look like etc. These activities are not to judge people, but to understand them. We have already studied hundreds of homes in India.

Every home we went to was different than the previous one, but the one thing common was that Indians all love their homes and family. People are happy to invite others to celebrate festivals or just have casual meetings. Similarly, for IKEA, family is very important.

Storage issues are very common in metros like Mumbai, Delhi or Bengaluru. That’s also something which we will focus on and provide solutions for.

The do-it-yourself concept which IKEA is famous for, may not work in India which is heavily service-demand oriented. How do you plan to work your way around it?

When IKEA comes, we will stimulate the entire furniture market. IKEA has never wanted to kill others in the home furnishing sector whenever it enters a market. For instance, when we opened in South Korea in 2014, there was a big concern from smaller carpenters about IKEA coming but to everyone’s surprise, our entry increased the size of the sector by 10%. We know that not everyone would like to buy from IKEA but the segment grew as people got newer ideas. Regarding DIY, we are aware of the market and habits here and hence, will be outsourcing packaging and delivering to a third party. It will create more job opportunities as well.

What will be your marketing strategy in India?

We want to meet as many people as possible and tell them what they can do with their homes even if they have very little money. We will have an app where one can see the different makeover programmes done by IKEA and follow different homes to look for ideas, information etc. We will have small webisodes on this app. So, you can say that mobile is very important for us.

We also plan to have small experience stores which we call hej home, which means ‘hello home’ in Swedish, where we want people to experience Swedish tradition and know where we come from. We will invite people to get a taste of IKEA. Apart from that television, outdoor and print will also be tapped into, but we want to do this in an innovative way.

As for the budget allocation for marketing, we are in the phase of preparing how much we need to spend on this. IKEA wants to become part of people’s lives so our communication will be to convey that — how we want to help them create beautiful homes. For our regular customers, we have something called IKEA Family, which is a loyalty programme designed for people who love their homes, and love to shop at IKEA. But this will come later when we have a database, which will log people’s aspirations and dreams. And we will call people for workshops, send them magazines at home etc.

IKEA has been conducting house visits across India. How have these helped you identify the needs of Indian households?

We invest heavily in research. Teams from communication, interior design, etc, apart from local employees, help us understand homes in India. We want to understand local nuances. So, there must be, in all, 20 people who are researching for us.

We choose different age-groups, income groups, where they live, how many live in a house etc to get a better understanding. And to everyone’s surprise, IKEA researchers have been welcomed in every home, so far. People in China were reluctant to open their homes to us, but in India it is quite the opposite. So, here we have got easy access to insights.

The success of IKEA is because it is affordable. As we start more production here, the prices will go on decreasing. But we do not compromise on quality.

There are five elements — affordability, high quality, design, functionality and sustainability — which all our products have to have else there is no space for them in an IKEA store.

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First published on: 22-03-2016 at 00:03 IST
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