According to an article on Marketing Magazine this morning, IKEA have succeeded in forcing fan site ikeahackers.net to remove all advertising. This was a compromise, originally they’d sent a cease and desist order and demanded that the site handover the domain.
Seriously? What retailer wouldn’t love to have a fan site showing people how they can do more with their products? Let’s face it, IKEA stuff is pretty functional and its greatest appeal is value for money. But it’s not just for students, with a bit of imagination it can look great—we’ve got quite a bit of it around the office. Why would any company want to discourage people from sharing their ideas? I could understand it if the site was pretending to be “official”, but it doesn’t even use the IKEA logo. It just shows that even companies that portray themselves as youthful and creative—remember the Chuck Out Your Chintz campaign?—just don’t get the social/crowdsourcing world.
Cue social media blacklash and a bunch of bad publicity. Instead of attacking the site, IKEA should have put up a prize for the best ideas.
For more details, read Jules’s blog.
Posted by John on 17 June 2014