Ogilvy: IKEA’s Dollar Catalogue

In May 2021 a COVID-19 outbreak forced Taiwan’s government to implement a lockdown. This triggered two noteworthy shifts: customers spending more on homeware and a shift to ecommerce.

Due to the economic pressure of COVID-19 IKEA needed to elevate people’s willingness to shop with them. 70% of Taiwanese people mistakenly believed that since IKEA is imported it must be expensive. With IKEA’s product catalogue spanning more than 8,500 items, more affordable products could often get buried.

Breaking from IKEA’s custom of categorising products according to the different rooms of the home, Ogilvy and IKEA launched the brand’s first electronic catalogue sorted according to price, the IKEA Dollar Catalogue: 100 items, 100 pages, 100 prices, ranging from 1 to 100 Taiwan dollars.

Within the IKEA Dollar Catalogue, the page number equaled the product price. By sorting out these low-priced products for consumers, Ogilvy and IKEA were able to change the order in which shoppers received information, all while speeding up the buying process. By using a more intuitive UX/UI experience, IKEA created a more direct connection to their customers.

The campaign also included a video, counting off seconds that equaled the product prices. Stairs of an underground parking garage and train stations were also used as part pf the campaign, where a product price appeared on each step. All aspects pf the campaign fully reflected the brand spirit: Affordable Makes Wonderful.

In less than two weeks, the IKEA Dollar Catalogue had over 10 million page views. The web page’s bounce rate was only 58.2% of that for the whole website. It scored 21 million impressions, and most importantly, it achieved an ecommerce conversion rate of 264%.