Well I was wrong. (Wouldn't be the first time!) Ikea did unleash 100 house cats into its store, however, it was controlled chaos - I know an oxymoron. They did it at a time when no customers were there and they could just video the cats.
The results must be a marketers dream!!! If most people, love this video as much as I do, then they have moved their brand well into the next decade!! (I know that IKEA has its problems, but they help a lot of people live, with a small foot on a crowded planet.)
I can hear them now, in the planning stages for the ad campaign, saying something like....OK, cat videos go viral...so maybe we should do something with cats to promote the brand.....they murmur on "Henri's been done," "maybe too childish." "Can we call a cat "Tidafors?" "Petit Fours" sounds better....
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| Token Black Cat |
Then someone brilliant - maybe an assistant, who wanted to go home, says, "Look I have 5 cats why don't you take them and...... and then someone else says, why just 5 cats, why not 50. Someone else does the math. They work out the square footage and decide that 50 cats would be lost in the space, so why not use 100 cats - at this point the guy with the red hair says, "why not 1,000."
Well 1,000 cats would mean that a few would be lost and surface in the rug department on Monday morning or maybe not at all and then there would be real PR issues. No, it's easier and cheaper to electronically tag 100 cats so let's just set them lose and see what happens!! You got it!!
"Got what?" says the CEO, who has fallen asleep because someone mentioned cats and he obviously has not been plugged into the selling power of CATS!!!! (I whisper, T.S. Eliot lives - but that's an aside.) Here is the video!!!
The picture - the token black cat missing from the video. I am surprised that there were no black cats - bad luck - maybe.
Have an amazing day!!
It's brilliant (and I wondered why all the cats were pale as well!) But how on earth did they round them all up again. Is some poor moggy stuck in a drawer or a billy bookcase flat pack?
ReplyDeleteLovely Carol. Will share...
ReplyDeleteCarol I love this post, it's genius :) xx
ReplyDeleteIt's a clever and sophisticated look. More so towards the end. Midway it looked like a creepy invasion. Not that I don't like cats... must be some underlying memory of a bad sci-fi film. I was tempted to think of your last name... is it pronounced "Too Many"... :)
ReplyDeleteApparently, black cats are not well liked. They are the ones that never get adopted from shelters. So marketing-wise, they would most probably not be a good choice.
ReplyDelete