How Ikea Creates Massive Demand For The Ektorp Sofa: It Thinks About Moms

IKEA has made very clear choices about who they will be and to whom they will matter, and why. Can you say the same for your brand? Göran Carstedt, president of IKEA North America, summoned his top executives to a large meeting room to share his strategic plan. They arrived prepared for a flashy PowerPoint presentation complete with charts and graphs. Instead, Carstedt told them a story about a mother. He depicted a detailed scene of her and her husband getting two kids off to school in the morning. She gets up, makes coffee, wakes up the children, makes breakfast, and so on. Then he paused and moved to the heart of the matter: “Our strategic plan is to make that family’s life easier by providing them with convenient and affordable household items in an accessible location. Period.” Carstedt, in short, wanted IKEA to enter the scene, to populate it with IKEA-...