Design fans, urban dwellers, and students eagerly await IKEA’s catalog every year. This year, the products pictured in the catalog are not the only new features within the pages. The furniture giant hired advertising agency McCann-Erickson to inject some of the company’s creativity into its 62 year old catalog which is sent to over 200 million customers worldwide. The 2013 issue has been revamped to include mobile augmented reality and interactive technologies.
After downloading the new IKEA Catalog App, customers can scan special pages with their smartphone or tablet to view videos showing home design ideas, photo galleries, profiles of designers, and x-ray peeks inside the furniture.
While other retailers are shifting to online and digital formats, IKEA was adamant about keeping the printed catalog as a base. Why is the company known for being efficient and modern standing firmly behind its paper format? Lena Simonsson Berge, Ikea’s Head of Global Communications, explains to Creativity Online
“Many other companies would have started this exercise by doing a deep study on how much more efficient this could be totally online, versus paper, but, typical Ikea, we like to do things a bit backwards. We believe in something, and we go from there and see what we could do about it. Of course, what has happened throughout these years is the media landscape has changed, people’s media consumption behavior has changed,” she said. “It takes so much more than it did in the 1950s and even ten years ago, when it was still quite easy to stand out from the junk mail and other advertising in your mailbox. But we don’t want to wait until things go bad, so we wanted to give it an injection, enliven it. It’s still a very powerful marketing tool, but we don’t want to be just one of the others. We want to stand out.”
The 2013 catalogs are currently in mailboxes around the globe and the interactive features will be available the last week of July 2012. Until then, watch a video of the catalog below:
Via: Design Taxi, Creativity Online
