What elements of the external environment have presented Ikea with opportunities or challenges?explain

The first thing that comes to mind when you think of IKEA is probably furniture, but it could also be Swedish look for every room in your house. IKEA is the largest furniture and home appliance manufacturer and retailer in the world. Founded seven decades ago in Smland, Sweden, by Ingvar Kamprad, in 2019, the IKEA Group had 422 IKEA stores in more than 50 markets and employed about 208,000 people giobally, with a portfolio of more than 9,500 products. In 2018 , IKEA reported 957 million store visits and 2.5 billion visits to the website. A large part of the company's success is its continually evolving marketing strategy. The brands that everyone knows are the ones that have a very clear identity. IKEA is one of those brands. Its message of ease, value, and maximizing your space is clear in everything it does. IKEA is well known for clean advertising with a few bold colors (blue, yellow, and orange, which are the brand's colors) and images showing immaculate homes with modem, clean decor. When you see a picture of an IKEA bedroom, you know it's an IKEA bedroom. IKEA is constantly adding to its offerings with new products that often become part of the permanent collection. Any time IKEA changes things up, it gives current customers a new incentive to come check things out, and creates new opportunities to catch the interest of would-be customers. In 2018, the world's largest furniture retailer shifted its marketing focus from rooms to product innovation, and in 2019, the company known for its thick print catalogs of furniture and home inspiration launched Catalogs updates on Pinterest, allowing retailers to upload their full catalog to Pinterest and tum their products into dynamic Product Pins in order to mine Pinterest's prime audience of DIY'ers, how-to-ers, influencers, and customizers. "We didn't want to just copy and paste-we already have a digital catalogue online," says IKEA media project manager Kerri Longarzo. "But promotions in the past felt a little stale. We were running out of ways to show the catalogue to people online, so we sought out something different."1 Thus, IKEA created a product questionnaire built into Pinterest to learn what users were shopping for and interested in. Pinterest users could either let IKEA fill an automated Pinterest board based on their responses or browse through recommended products and build their own boards. Pins in the program were linked to product and catalog pages on the IKEA site. "Our communication reflects IKEA values both visually and in tone of voice, so marketing and communications coworkers include art directors and copywriters, interior designers and project leaders. Together they work with the IKEA catalog, IKEA websites, publications, brochures, advertising, internal communication and public relations. .2 IKEA has run successful campaigns in which it has gotten insight from customers to help shape the company's marketing and product decisions. A great example of Marketing Processes and Consumer Behavior this was IKEA's First :59 campaign, in which they reached out to its customers to as! them about their morning routine and how it affects the rest of their day, and then provided resources to help make momings better. IKEA's marketing strategy clearly focuses on product and price elements of the marketing mix. Even so, the company doesn't ignore place and promotion. Product campaigns contain engaging images, videos, and text, and items are deliberately placed in situations in which it almost feels as though the customer is stumbling upon them organically (rather than seeing them in a promotion). In addition to a strong social media presence, the company is embedded in pop culture. In fact, you can see IKEA products in movies such as Fight Club and 500 Days of Summer and TV programs such as 30 Rock, Being Human, and Ghost Town. None of this is random. IKEA's marketing plan is closely tied to and informed by the overall business idea and company vision, which is prominently published on the website. "'To create a better everyday life for the many people', this is the IKEA vision. Our business idea is 'to offer a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them.' Our vision also goes beyond home furnishing. We want to create a better everyday for all people impacted by our business." " (After studying the content in this chapter, you should be able to answer a set of discussion questions found at the end of the chapter.)