IKEA is ditching the idea that brands need to “be everywhere”. Instead it’s turning to intimate, highly localised events designed to reflect how people actually live across Australia and New Zealand.
From secret Kiwi garage parties and beachside pop-ups to a $19.95-a-night staycation in an inner-city Sydney home, the Swedish furniture giant is increasingly using local insights to bring its global brand to life in different markets.
Patricia Routledge, head of communications for IKEA Australia and New Zealand, told B&T that while IKEA’s core brand assets remain consistent globally, the way the brand activates them can – and should – look very different from market to market.
“We don’t mess with the brand,” Routledge said. “The brand cues are so strong. We’re so lucky to have them. People recognise them, people love them.”
Instead, the brand looks at how people live in a particular market and uses those insights to determine how IKEA should show up.
That approach was particularly evident around IKEA’s launch into New Zealand, where the retailer officially opened its first physical store and launched nationwide online shopping in December 2025.
Ahead of the opening, IKEA staged a series of secret “housewarming” events across Auckland – deliberately designed to introduce the brand to a market where many consumers had never experienced an IKEA store.
One took place in a house, another transformed a garage into a late-night party space, while a third took the experience to the beach.
And the garage party was not a random creative flourish.
It came directly from IKEA’s own Life at Home research, which revealed just how differently Kiwis use their garages.
“You do so much in your garage, it’s unreal,” Routledge said. “You put carpet down in them and stuff.”
So IKEA leaned into it.
The result was a garage party built around R&B and hip-hop, creating an experience that felt distinctly Kiwi rather than like a Swedish campaign transplanted into New Zealand.
“It was an authentic experience for them to engage with the brand,” she said. “And when you host these intimate events you learn things that you then take into the next time you do them.”
That learning is becoming an increasingly important part of IKEA’s approach. Rather than judging every activation purely on how much reach it can generate, Routledge said smaller events can “create deeper connections” by giving audiences something genuinely relevant to them.
“It’s communicating with an audience where you’re not expecting a heaping return,” she said. “It’s going, ‘Hey, actually, we just want to engage with you.’”
So what are these events?
The strategy around events for IKEA looks different in Australia, where the brand recently turned an inner-city Sydney home into a $19.95-a-night staycation to launch its IKEA PS collection.
The collection itself is global – its bold colours, playful designs and distinctive products remain the same – but IKEA found a distinctly Australian way to bring it to life.
The $19.95 price was a nod to 1995, the year the collection launched, while also tapping into the very contemporary Australian pressure around the cost of living and the cost of staying in Sydney.
“We’ve tapped into cost of living pressures,” Routledge said, pointing to the challenge of spending a night in an inner-city Sydney property for such a low price.
The brand found an “incredible” high-end designer home in Camperdown, hired it out and transformed it into a physical expression of the collection.
Consumers could book one of five nights for just $19.95 and experience the IKEA PS range for themselves.
But the staycation was only one part of the activation.
Before opening the doors to guests, IKEA hosted a housewarming party, inviting influencers into the property during the day to create content, partnering with realestate.com.au and bringing media through to interview spokespeople.
That night, the house became a party showcasing the collection – complete with IKEA food, including its famous meatballs.
For Routledge, the execution demonstrated how the same global product can feel completely different when it is placed within a local cultural context.
“That was a very Australian way to demonstrate this beautiful range that could be anywhere in the world,” she said. “But it was in Camperdown, in this incredible inner-city Sydney house, and with the insight around the cost of being able to stay somewhere in Sydney for that amount of money.
“No matter where we are hosting these events, what we are showing people won’t change, but the way that we show it just shifts to have that Australian flair.”
What are the benefits of smaller events?
That thinking around events also feeds into IKEA’s influencer strategy. For its children’s range, GREJSIMOJS, IKEA deliberately avoided simply sending products to high-profile influencers and hoping for traditional product coverage.
Instead, it invited influencers into stores with their children and created an experience around the range.
There were musical chairs using bright, fluffy chair covers, beanbags and play areas, with the children able to experience the products before their parents went shopping with them.
The influencers could then share what actually happened – rather than simply unboxing a product in their homes.
“We know that marketing will go for reach, right?” Routledge said. “They’ll go for high-profile influencers, really secured reach far and wide.”
“But what we might do within comms with influencers is for GREJSIMOJS, we invited them into store with their children, and we gave their children the experience.”
She told B&T that while IKEA’s communications team may have less control over the final content when influencers are creating from an authentic experience, but Routledge believes that can ultimately make the work more effective.
“So whilst they might be a smaller platform, they’re going to work even harder because people will resonate with them more,” she said. “I think it’s more about how people are interacting with the range and the product,” Routledge said.
She highlighted the difference between an influencer simply opening a product at home and showing how it fits into their real life – shopping with their children, carrying the blue FRAKTA bag, stopping for meatballs and then taking the furniture home to build together.
“It’s more about the experience of the range, not just the product in and of itself,” she said.
‘Adding to the reputational pitch’
Joining her on the interview was Tim O’Rourke, head of customer success ANZ at Meltwater – which provides IKEA with media intelligence and data analytics tools to track brand performance.
Commenting on the strategy move by IKEA to focus on hyper-local experiences, he described it as “something new, fresh and interesting”.
“Having activations that are authentic and are able to like tap into an emotional state or something that’s really niche to to the Australian landscape always really does play well,” he told B&T.
O’Rourke highlighted how in Australia, we look at things like trends and news on social platforms.
“There’s channels on social that are not as popular in Australia as they are in other places overseas.”
“For example, X is not as prevalent as a B2C type of promotion channel, whereas something like Reddit and review sites in Australia, we see a huge long tail, and and a lot of that’s driven from the News Corp, Nine, like media ecosystems, Australian Community Media.
“A lot of those entities will share a lot of content on their social media profiles as well. So it’s it’s it’s all kind of in that Australian ecosystem, and and doing events that can get picked up in multiple areas like that really does, I guess, add to that reputational pitch.”
He said he’s seeing a lot of executives across Australia “not just checking what’s on the front pages of the newspapers”.
“They’re now checking what’s being spoken about in a community thread or forum. And that’s actually the first point of call about the media intelligence these days, not necessarily just the the stock standard types of content from the past.”
“So tying those all into into that authentic and emotional kind of event activation that IKEA is doing always plays well.”
