Zapera pre-tested the World's largest DVD production

IKEA is playing for high stakes on a global kitchen campaign this year. It is called "kitchen dreams" and the primary promotion channel is a one hour-long DVD movie. 12 million copies have been sent out to all over the world and this is more than any other dvd production.

The theme is "Complete Kitchen Living" and IKEA wants to tell the message that everybody can easily and cheap find their new kitchen at IKEA. The in-house department IKEA Communications who is responsible for the production of the campaign wanted to pre-test the message of the movie on a representative panel on the Internet instead of focus groups.

Robert Kron, creative manager at IKEA Communications says: "We thought about doing an Internet survey done by Zapera. We knew that Internet surveys is a perfect way of testing short TV commercials, but was it technically possible to run a 15 minutes long sequence on the Internet?" Yes, 83% of the respondents watched the 15-minute long sequence without any difficulties. The sequence tested was spontaneously perceived as very charming, nice and inspiring and had a high overall evaluation. The fact that it was ordinary people who posed in the movie was the most appreciated. In addition, there was a positive evaluation of the before and after shots of the families’ kitchens. However the respondents found the quick series of images in the beginning very confusing.

Nine of ten also found that the movie was to long. This was primarily people who did not plan to get a new kitchen and rarely visited IKEA. On the other hand, 63 % of the respondents who did have plans to buy a new kitchen were more interested in buying their new kitchen from IKEA after having seen the movie.

Robert Kron says: "I’m very satisfied with the way Zapera did the survey. Zapera was effective and we got a good and thorough feedback. Another positive notice was the English version, which we used for selling the movie internationally. Our post tests coincide perfectly with the pre-test survey and the report done by Zapera. The experience strengthened our positive image of Zapera’s Internet based surveys."

Sample: 155 women, 25-54 years old, who are interested in interior decoration and who live in a visiting distance from a Swedish IKEA store.

Source: Zapera News, Issue 21, February 2006