How IKEA stays ahead of the game: Inside the retail giant's global media and brand health monitoring strategy
The Challenge
IKEA is the world’s largest furniture retailer with 460 stores around the globe and operations in 62 markets. Customers everywhere are obsessed with the company’s affordable, stylish home furnishings — and they’re posting to social media about it eight to 12 times every minute.
From a public relations perspective, Sprinklr has really become our eyes and ears out into the world.”
Global Social Media Director for Inter IKEA Group, IKEA
Ferencz Thuroczy is global social media director for Inter IKEA Group, the franchisor of the IKEA brand.
“IKEA is a huge ecosystem,” says Thuroczy. “Lots of things are happening in lots of places, constantly. And I wanted to connect all the dots and feed those insights back to our teams — like product, marketing, and PR.”
Thuroczy wanted to build out a social listening framework that would serve as a strategic capability for IKEA business units. He wanted to listen to relevant online conversations, analyze them, and provide the business with useful and actionable insights.
He looked for a scalable solution that would grow with his team, as they work to deepen their understanding of IKEA’s customers and the effectiveness of its products, while managing risk to the brand.
Thuroczy needed a solution that:
- Provided brand monitoring with comprehensive media coverage
- Allowed for 24/7 monitoring of traditional and digital channels together in one media monitoring view
- Captured, analyzed, and consolidated data into one unified view — in compliance with Europe’s data and privacy laws
- Enabled him to easily and quickly share reports with stakeholders
The Solution
IKEA implemented Sprinklr’s unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform with a strong focus on Media Monitoring & Analytics from Sprinklr Insights.
“There are tools out there that are fine and that will fulfill your needs,” says Thuroczy. “And then there are solutions that you can grow with that have an enterprise focus. That’s what we were looking for when we landed on Sprinklr.”
With Media Monitoring & Analytics, IKEA now has granular, real-time insight into what’s happening at the local level around the globe with its customers, its products, and its brand.
The solution gives teams a line of sight on current and trending events — as well as any potential brand crises. With AI-based crisis detection, they receive early-stage alerts on events that are generating social buzz and can ensure the right parties are notified whenever top-tier publications or sites are talking about the business, the brand, or its products. This enables them to proactively manage their brand reputation — and provides IKEA with visibility into what’s happening at the local level around the globe.
“From a public relations perspective, Sprinklr has really become our eyes and ears out into the world,” says Thuroczy.
Sprinklr’s dashboard is another important element for IKEA, providing key stakeholders with a clear view into how well the brand is doing around the globe.
“It's a one-stop shop to figure out how good you're actually doing,” says Thuroczy.
Thuroczy worked closely with Sprinklr to create the Media Impact Score capability. He was looking for a way to understand and better quantify the work of IKEA’s public relations team that went beyond earned media value and potential reach.
The metric is calculated based on five key indices:
- Relevance — If the message appears prominently in search results, e.g. if the title appears several times, then it's considered to have high relevancy and better visibility, which equates to higher impact.
- Engagement — If the news article goes viral on social media, it likely has high relevance and impact.
- Domain Authority — If the news article is from a popular source and is likely to rank high in search engine results, it likely has better visibility and higher impact.
- Global Rank — If the news article is from a publication with a high number of page views, then it is likely trustworthy and has better visibility.
- Syndication — If original content is picked up directly by publications (vs. through newswires), then they likely have higher impact.
This Media Impact Score, and the ability to weigh it, has enabled IKEA to better understand the impact of its press officers’ work — and to create and measure that work against key performance indicators.
The Outcome
By streamlining media monitoring and analytics processes, IKEA teams can allocate their time more efficiently towards strategic initiatives that demand cognitive resources.
Prior to adopting Sprinklr, the abundance of data was challenging to process efficiently, resulting in a time-consuming process, with a lot of manual work, of sifting through it to identify relevant insights. With Sprinklr, the team can prioritize improving data quality and presenting actionable insights to leadership.
“We have so much data, and we need to understand all of it, so we use Sprinklr,” says Thuroczy.