IKEA GLOBAL
Championing progress with IKEA for the LGBT+ community
The challenge
To mark this year’s IDAHOT (International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia) and Pride IKEA wanted to show how everyone – from its employees to its customers – could play an important part in making more LGBT+ people feel at home.
Our campaign needed to steer well away from the corporate ‘rainbow-washing’ that many brands were being called out on. Instead, it had to demonstrate how IKEA is a real ally to the LGBT+ community, 365 days a year, with many initiatives to back it up. This global campaign had to speak to the different levels of progress in different markets, ensuring our message of support rung true.
What we did:
- Insight and strategy
- Campaign concept
- Testing with LGBT+ community
- Film concept and production
- Social content
- In-store content
- IKEA co-worker engagement toolkit
Our approach
To get a wide and varied view on people’s lived experiences, we consulted with individuals from the LGBT+ community, leaders from LGBT+ charities, alongside representatives from various IKEA markets to understand what the community was going through, and what support would be most welcomed.
From there we built our creative platform, ‘Progress is Made’, with the message that progress takes guts, determination and hands-on action to achieve. Our hero film featured four people from the community and shared their unique stories, while our accompanying social and in-store campaign showed how people could be better LGBT+ allies.
Progress is made
To show how many identities make up the LGBT+ community, we worked with four people from Scotland, Serbia, England and the USA – each with their own identity and experience to share. The film was shot remotely, and allowed us to enter the homes of our spokespeople to capture the intimate moments that demonstrate progress.
The key to any successful campaign at IKEA is co-creation with experts and our country teams. With Given we spoke to the experts in our business and several external experts, like the Diversity Standards Collective, to understand the latest challenges and where we could have the best impact.
Jessie Macneil-Brown
Head of Global Campaigns
IKEA Group