Showing Australians the community of the future

Challenge

IKEA identified accelerated urbanisation as a mega trend that will affect us all. For us to continue to live in urban areas, our future cities need to be locally sustainable. However, Australians still view this as an issue that won’t affect us in this lifetime and aren’t open to the future of shared dining, living, working and playing. Our objective was to shift these views, position IKEA Australia as a thought leader in sustainability and inspire Australians to live a more sustainable life at home.

Culture

Despite our population expected to almost double in the next half century, only a third of Aussies (32 per cent) believe we will be ready for new living scenarios and over half of Australians don’t see these changes happening within our lifetime. In order to engage Australians we would need to extend the narrative beyond these data points and provide them with a visual representation of what the future of living looks like.

Creativity

We conducted local market consumer research to get an understanding of what Australian perceptions are of the future of living. Are they aware of the implications accelerated urbanization will have on living situations? Would they be open to co-living, co-working, co-playing and co-eating? This identified the hook we needed to get media interested in our story. In order to help Australians visualise what the future of living could look like, we worked with a local artist to develop visual renders of the community of the future based on the IKEA People Positive Planet Report 2017. Armed with our local consumer research, the visual renders and insight from IKEA Australia’s Sustainability Manager Dr Kate Ringvall, we had a compelling story that demonstrated what the future of living looks like and how IKEA is helping Australia become a more sustainable place to live. To bring to life the future of shared dining, we worked with the IKEA future-living lab SPACE10 to launch The Growroom in Australia. The Growroom is an open-source urban farm pavilion that explores how cities can feed themselves through shared food-producing architecture. Located at Hickson Road with the backdrop of the iconic Sydney Harbour, consumers were able to experience shared dining with produce picked from the Growroom.

Clout

The IKEA Australia Sustainability Launch generated 104 pieces of editorial and social coverage, with 100% positive sentiment. 15 key media attended the launch event to showcase the Growroom, and the campaign achieved a total reach of over 24,409,390 Australians.

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