How IKEA Let Its Products Speak for Themselves
- Kimaya Agrawal
- Aug 17
- 2 min read
“A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is, it’s what consumers tell each other it is.” — Scott Cook
IKEA has long been associated with affordability and accessibility, but not durability. Its flat-packed furniture is often dismissed as temporary, disposable, or even “made of cardboard and rust.” That reputation, while tied to its price point, has overshadowed the brand’s sustainability messaging and undermined consumer trust in product longevity.
In response, IKEA Portugal launched the Hidden Tags campaign. Most IKEA furniture contains a manufacturing tag discreetly placed inside or underneath the item, typically overlooked by users. The campaign invited IKEA Family members to locate these hidden labels, photograph them, and submit the production date online. The incentive? A €2,000 voucher for the customer with the oldest IKEA product still in use.
The results were surprising and strategic. Over 4,500 tags were submitted. The average furniture age was 18.5 years, and the oldest recorded piece was a table manufactured in 1969, still functional after over five decades. These submissions were not just proof points; they became organic endorsements, reframing the IKEA narrative from “disposable” to “durable.”
From a marketing perspective, the brilliance of IKEA’s campaign was its transition from declarative branding to participatory proof. Rather than asserting durability, IKEA invited consumers to uncover it themselves, by locating the hidden manufacturing tags embedded in their furniture. This move shifted the locus of credibility from the brand to the consumer, turning longevity into a shared discovery rather than a claim. It reframed ownership as authorship: Consumers became agents of proof, offering personal, timeworn artifacts as evidence of longevity, independent of brand narration.
Hidden Tags sidestepped conventional marketing tropes, emotive storytelling, polished visuals, influencer endorsements, and instead foregrounded product fact. By inviting consumers to locate and share the overlooked manufacturing tags on their furniture, IKEA redirected attention to design longevity embedded in the product itself.
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