The global retail giant, IKEA, recently debuted a guerrilla marketing campaign , designed by Forsman & Bodenfors, for the opening of a new Malmö, Sweden store that utilized Facebook's tagging feature. Here's how it worked.
- They created a profile for the new store"s manager, Gordon Gustavsson (aka "IKEA Gordon").
- Facebook members in the new store's geographic area were encouraged to request Gordon as a friend. As of today, he has 960 friends.
- During a two week period, pictures were added to Gustavsson's profile showing various floor showrooms.
- The first people to tag their names onto a product won it. One prize per person.
Pretty simple, right?
Here's how it worked virally: As each Facebook user tagged his or her name onto an item in the picture, that action was published to the individual's feed, creating a viral effect as the campaign was shared between friends and spread across thousands of different profile pages.
Here's a video that shows it in action.
One source reported:
The campaign has been highly rated as it was built upon a very simple technique which showed strong results in building consumer awareness while incurring minimal cost. The project has also been aided by creating a large amount of PR written about the unique campaign.
There have been some questions raised about whether this type of marketing violates Facebook's terms of service, but I haven't seen any reports either way. It certainly wasn't meant to reach a vast audience, just a very specifically targeted one.
I think it was a very clever way to use that particular Facebook feature, especially for a local business.

{ 2 comments }
Fine idea! I think this will work for MySpace also. I wonder if it is applicable to small adverts too.
.-= Fictioner´s last blog ..Vril 2.0 =-.
Yes, its was really very smart and I think very successful step to use Facebook that promote poduct!!!
Hm, need to think about it that also use this idea!
.-= Sandra´s last blog ..???????????? ?????? =-.
Comments on this entry are closed.