IKEA

Liberate The Home

What will the home of the future look like? What differences should we expect globally? We went searching for answers

We’ve conducted a number of projects for IKEA, and for a range of their teams. These include profiling attitudes to design in different markets, and this one: Liberate The Home, which saw us decoding how the home is used in UK, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, USA; and how changing trends to do with families, work, dining and entertainment will challenge current convention. How did we do it? Via a global blogging initiative which deployed a roll-call of interesting and highly informed experts.

We worked with progressive thinkers (writers, architects, academics, designers), all offering their own takes on how the home is changing; fuelling us with content and debate to derive core themes from. Out of this rich and varied source material, we created PR and strategic outputs for stakeholders to use with aplomb.

  • Narrated Galleries

    We love films, but narrated galleries – fusing showreels of still images and audio of participant commentary – creates outputs that allow for high levels of reflection and audience empathy. Ideal for user experience work, in other words

  • Crowd Communities

    We’ve a wealth of experience at setting up and managing communities for clients, with learnings on how best to engage audiences and a full box of tricks for maximising what we get out of the work – including geo tagging, streaming in social media data and a mobile optimised platform

  • Pinterest

    We’ve used Pinterest to really good effect on a number of projects recently, helping us to explore differences and commonalities among different typologies in areas such as fashion and style, home, holidays and entertainment. Engagement levels with participants always rank high, and clients love the vividness and clarity of the findings.

  • Citizen Journalism

    Citizen journalism works on the principle of making reporters of our participants, briefing them to capture what’s happening in the lives of their friends and family via video dispatches and blogging. It gets us places where we can’t otherwise get. It bypasses the bias of having a researcher in attendance. People are often more accurate reporters on those around them than on themselves, so that’s another bias circumnavigated.

  • Network Audits

    If you want to really understand how people interact with those around them, it’s logical to research interconnected groups of friends, family and work colleagues. First developed as part of our award winning word of mouth research for Guardian News & Media, and since then refined and reconfigured across a range of global projects, our network audit approach helps us understand who’s influencing who as authentically as possible.