Wow, Ikea has a sense of humour; and brand necrophilia
Literary critic Hellmuth Karasek in Ikea’s latest ad campaign.
There are some object lessons in Ikea’s latest advertising approach for other multinational brands, writes Dominic Mills.
I hate Ikea. It’s like the Tesco of flat-pack home furnishing, except it’s on steroids.
But unlike Tesco, it’s got a sense of humour, not just reflected by those crazy product names. Oh, and it has not so far fallen victim to corporate hubris.
Perhaps the two are connected.
I first saw evidence of Ikea’s capacity for fun last year, with this ad for its 2015 catalogue by BBH Singapore.
Apparently for a new tablet device – the ‘bookbook’ – it lists the product benefits of a print catalogue (i.e. no cable, no battery required, tactile navigation technology (fingers for turning the pages) with the same breathless excitement as an Apple ad. Very droll.
And now they’ve topped it, for the 2016 catalogue, with a YouTube film featuring a 77 year old German literary critic, one Hellmuth Karasek, who I guess is the Teutonic equivalent of Alan Yentob or Will Gompertz.
Watch this brilliant ad, in which Karasek deadpans his way through a review of the latest Ikea catalogue in the manner of one of those interminable arts programmes featuring self-important talking heads.
The film – it’s four-plus minutes and sub-titled – starts with Karasek explaining that it is a scandal that the world’s most widely distributed ‘book’ – 220m copies and counting – has never been properly reviewed.
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He then subjects it to the same treatment he would give a work by, say Goethe, dissecting the plot and characterisation. “It could be criticised for having more pictures than characters,” he says.
“It has a lot to say, but much of it could be considered junk.
“You could say it is a ‘furnished novel’,” he adds, as if Ikea had invented a new genre, “and the characters are forced to crowd themselves between the furniture.”
There are some object lessons in Ikea’s approach for other multinational advertisers.
1. The bigger the advertiser, the more self-deprecating humour charms and disarms.
2. Despite being in German, the ad works anywhere. There’s no need to descend to the lowest-common denominator to bind an audience together.
3. Just because it’s an international ad, you don’t have to rely on pictures or imagery instead of words. This ad doesn’t stray beyond the star, Karasek, sitting in his armchair and pontificating.
4. There’s no need to talk down to your audience, even if it mass. Both the ‘bookbook’ and literary review ads treat their audience as intelligent grown-ups.
5. The more mundane a product (especially a catalogue), the greater the need for some creative, off-the-wall thinking.
Separately, here’s a question for the anoraks to deal with. Is this an ad? Or is it content marketing? Many would plump for the latter, I suspect, because it’s long-form and on YouTube. But is that a good enough distinction? And at what point does an ad become content?
Either way, next time I have to go to Ikea, I won’t resent every minute of it.
HSBC sidesteps chance of some brand necrophilia
Well, that’s it then. Having hinted that the bank would resurrect the Midland name for its reconstituted UK branch network, HSBC chairman Douglas Flint has done a rapid u-turn.
I feel cheated. I was looking forward to a bit of brand necrophilia.
Last week the bank announced that it would instead stick with the name HSBC…and add the suffix UK. What a tease that turned out to be.
I expect the ad industry will feel cheated too. Advertising necrophilia is a lucrative business for it, offering huge rebranding fees and ad campaigns backed by multi-million pound budgets.
Whether that is a missed opportunity for HSBC remains to be seen. On the one hand the Midland name, which was retired in 1999, carries none of the toxicity attached to the current HSBC: an IT glitch at the end of last month, the Swiss tax scandal, and Mexican money-laundering.
Some of this may be rubbing off on HSBC’s UK retail bank: according to the UK Payments Council, which monitors account switching, HSBC is a net loser (down 10,000) in the year to end-March 2015, while Santander (up 43,000) and Halifax (up 53,000) are the big winners.
On the other hand, 16 years’ absence is a long time in banking history. To many consumers, especially those under 25, the Midland name will mean little or nothing. And the Midland itself became a byword for bank incompetence (bad acquisitions in the US, loans to dodgy Latin American countries gone bad).
Nevertheless, especially in the banking sector, necrophilia is in vogue.
The TSB name disappeared in 1999, only to be reintroduced last year.
And RBS will bring back the name Williams and Glyn after an absence of 30 years from the High Street when it spins off its excess branches into yet another challenger bank. As with the TSB, this will be accompanied by a lavish ad campaign trumpeting the provenance of the name.
What’s the attraction of these names from the past? Well, they are to a large extent untainted by the recent scandals. They offer banks a fresh start. There’s also a certain solidity conveyed by an old name like Midland, perhaps more than the bland alphabeticisation of HSBC which Ian Jack, writing in the Guardian, described as a hollow brand.
And the established banks are under threat as never before. At the last count, some 30 or so challengers have applied for bank licences from the Financial Conduct Authority. Some of these, like Atom and Fidor, have innovative business models that could eat into HSBC’s market share.
With a new name (even if it’s been dug up from the corporate graveyard), HSBC could have marked itself out as something different, and something new.
HSBC can still make a fresh start, but it will be a lot harder with the same old name.