Ikea's Ingvar Kamprad: A 70-year design, advertising and retail legacy

Jason Stone, editor, David Reviews

Ikea's revolutionary approach to home furnishings was more than matched by its revolutionary approach to marketing its wares.

When the Swedish company opened its first UK branch in the late 1980s, its competitors were responsible for some of the dreariest advertising seen on television. Then, as now, it seemed that each of its rivals used three randomly drawn Scrabble letters as a brand name and this made them difficult to distinguish from one another.

Ikea was plainly different. It has consistently used advertising to underline this and hasn't been afraid to take risks.

In the mid 1990s, a commercial urged Britons to 'chuck out your chintz' and replace it with the distinctively cool offerings available at Ikea, naturally. When Nicola Mendelsohn chose this commercial as one of her Desert Island Clips in an interview with The Drum, she said: "It was an unbelievably brave campaign. They absolutely nailed the insight that women make the decisions on who buys stuff in the home but it was like a wake-up call to say 'you've battled for your equal pay... you've battled for this and you've battled for that... why are you allowing your homes to look so shocking?' It's almost the 'burn your bra' campaign for this generation. And it's brave because there's very little product in it."

The controversy stoked by 'chuck out your chintz' was strictly Vauxhall Conference compared with the fuss that accompanied a 1998 commercial which had a coldhearted spokeswoman suggesting that Ikea's office furniture is so cool that you should consider making junior staff redundant in order to pay for it.

Even though it was clearly tongue-in-cheek, it was a gamble as advertising that makes light of human misery will always provoke a disorderly queue of detractors... and so it proved.

But it was unlikely that anyone would feel so strongly that they'd organise a boycott and – in any case – the absence of any competitor who can match Ikea's convenience and inexpensiveness has left the company able to take risks.

This dominance appeared to lead the company to question the value of advertising created specifically for the UK market for a while and its commercials lost their edge in the middle of the last decade.

BMB's work between 2007 and 2010 gave it back its characteristic voice and helped establish a tone that Mother has successfully used to fully rejuvenate Ikea's advertising mojo since it took over the account three years ago.

This partnership has produced a series of really memorable commercials that are both edgy and irreverent. The most recent has Ikea declaring war on garden furniture in much the same way as it once urged us to 'chuck out our chintz', prompting a battle royale with gnomes which paradoxically suggests that all is rosy in the Ikea garden.