Sweden wants to take back the names behind Ikea’s toilet brushes and tra
Ikea can be Sweden’s largest export product and associates the Scandinavian kingdom with ingenious and affordable home design. But it has also created serious SEO problems for the country.
Everyone who has shopped at Ikea knows that the brand’s gimmick is to name products with typically Swedish, difficult-to-pronounce names such as Ektorp and Kallax. Often these words are borrowed from the names of cities around the country. In practice, given the reseller’s huge online reach, this means that when someone searches for the term Bolmen on Google, they see Ikea’s toilet brush rather than a fantastic one lake in Småland.
The Danish Tourist Board has had enough. In a new campaign called “Discover the Originals”, it claims that Ikea has created a lot of misunderstandings, which has led people around the world to associate these names with their products, rather than with places in Sweden. The campaign invites visitors to Sweden to explore the exciting destinations that inspired the names. It is a smart, tongue-in-cheek strategy to make people around the world curious about lesser-known places in Sweden.
In addition to the video, the tourist board launched a new slogan for Lake Bolmen: “More than an Ikea brush.” Last week, local officials held a ceremony where they unveiled a new sign for an audience, including a group taking cold dips in the lake in the winter. The board also highlights 21 exciting tourist destinations named after Ikea’s products. It includes Norberg, the site of a silver mine, castles and ski slopes (which people know as an Ikea folding table), and Mästerby, the site of a medieval battlefield (which Ikea shoppers know as a staircase).
To create this campaign, the Tourism Council hired the Swedish advertising agency Forsman & Bodenfors. For Marcus Hägglöf and Johanna Hofman-Bang, who worked on the campaign, Ikea’s dominance as a brand is a blessing and a curse. They both live a few minutes from Ektorp, which is located in Stockholm County, but it dawned on them that even they think of sofas when they hear the word. – Even in Sweden, these names are often more associated with products than places, says Hägglöf. “I can not imagine any Swede naming his child Billy, because the name is now so associated with Ikea’s bookshelves.”
Online, the situation is even more difficult. – When you google Ektorp and Järvfjället, you only find sofas and game chairs, says Hägglöf. “Ikea is so powerful that they have displaced these places from the internet.”
But Hofman-Bang points out that a widespread awareness of Ikea in popular culture can also be an asset for the Tourist Board. “If it were not for Ikea, these places we have highlighted would not be interesting in the first place,” she says. “In a way, we are hijacking these names from Ikea. What can you do when talking about lesser-known places internationally? Ikea is our way in.”
For Forsman & Bodenfors, it was crucial to set the tone in the campaign. The Swedish Tourist Board is investing in maintaining a good relationship with Ikea as it is one of the country’s most well-known export products. But at the same time, it wanted to throw a little nuance to the brand – just enough to point out that the real places are more exciting than the products. To make sure they did not cross the border, Forsman & Bodenfors invited some Ikea executives to take a sneak peek at the video. They thought it was fun. – We wanted it to be annoying, says Hägglöf. “But with warmth.”