Brave and braver

As marketing aphorisms go, it seems sage and incontestable at first: ‘When the world zigs, zag.’ Here, after all, is a trenchant injunction to do what we marketers are paid for, and differentiate our products, services and brands without compromise at every level of customer interaction.

It’s only when you examine the reality a bit closer that you see the logical cracks in that pithy phrase, which falls apart a bit on cool reflection, as aphorisms tend to.

First, it is rare that the whole of whatever world you’re examining ‘zigs’.  It might be convenient if it did. But real markets are messy, with ziggers, zaggers, inbetweeners, sideswipers and switchers making things inordinately more complex and confusing. Within this seething asymmetry, marketers must find ways to differentiate without the option of reaching for polarity.

And on those rare occasions when every player in a market, to the best of your analysis, really does zig, it’s just possible there is a very good reason for that: something to do with regulations perhaps, or finite raw materials or the laws of commercial gravity. ‘Zig better’ isn’t as catchy as the original, but it is often the most viable option.

Entrepreneurial daring

Still, it does sometimes happen, especially in the entrepreneurial phase of a brand’s trajectory, that somebody brave and visionary totally transforms the way a sector is organised, bringing consumers a blend of product, service, delivery and price neither they nor the established competitors had ever countenanced. Some of our greatest brands started out this way.

Ikea has a claim to be not merely one of them, but the archetype. Back in 1950s Sweden, when a citizen bought a table, they got a table. Then along came Ingvar Kamprad who proposed to sell them, instead, a sheet of laminated chipboard, four legs, a bag of screws and a page of hieroglyphics. Assembly of the fully formed useful thing would be fashioned with the aid of a curious implement called an Allen key.

The business was candid enough to acknowledge the strangeness of this arrangement. An early advertisement declared, ‘We do half – you do half. We make furniture and send it out in flat packs. You groan a little and put it together.’

The world has groaned a fair bit since then, to the extent that Kamprad’s crazy zag has become the furniture retail default. You drive out to a massive shed on the ring road, navigate the one-way display system, fill your trolley with long carboard boxes, queue a bit, load everything into the car, head back home and kiss goodbye to a weekend.

That’s the format. That’s the deal. That’s the business model that has helped millions of consumers hold onto more of their hard-earned money when furnishing their homes and propelled Ikea to sales of €45bn last year.

That doesn’t mean the brand isn’t still looking for growth. Of course it is. There would be nothing instructive in learning that a big brand seeks to be bigger still. What’s instructive is one of the ways Ikea is going about it.

Corporate courage

Retail brands are leaving the high street in droves or have gone bust trying to maintain a presence there. Gone or retreating are Debenhams, Sports Direct, Paperchase, Poundland and WH Smith. Even the mighty Amazon couldn’t make the numbers work, and is shutting its Amazon Fresh neighbourhood grocery stores. In big retail today, faced with rising staff costs and slowing footfall, leaving town is the zig.

What is Ikea doing? It is coming the other way, with its Oxford Street London store now in its sixth month of trading.

What’s courageous here isn’t so much that Ikea is doing the opposite of what other retailers are doing, literally moving in when they are moving out. It’s that it is doing the opposite of what has made it such a success so far – challenging its own business model by taking expensive city-centre space, with no on-site parking, no pick-up ramp, and no easy means for customers to personally haul their flatpacks home.

This has thrown the emphasis on delivery, which the brand seeks to make an experiential touchpoint people love, not hate. Slots are bookable in advance to work around busy urban work schedules, and communication is frequent, clear and friendly. It’s also fast. You can buy a bed on Wednesday and be sleeping in it by Sunday.

London is not Ikea’s first foray into city-centre retailing. It tried it in Paris seven years ago and got it wrong. But the mark of a great brand is to learn, adapt and try again, if it believes its initial hypothesis is right.

Ikea does. It knows that inner cities are where millions of people live and work, that often they don’t have access to a car, and that they represent an underserved audience for well-designed, inexpensive furniture they can see, touch, try, choose and somehow get back home. I can’t find sales data for the Oxford Street store yet – it is still early days. But I can tell you anecdotally that when I popped in last week, it was teeming.

Ikea showed entrepreneurial daring at the outset seven decades ago – when there wasn’t much to lose. And it is showing corporate courage today – when there is. And at both ends of its brand journey so far it has backed that bravery with resourcefulness and flexibility. The brand’s promise to foster ‘a better everyday life for the many people’ has been consistent. The means of delivering it has been up for change. It is a reminder that when a business manages to keep moving forward, it is rarely in a straight line.

This week’s big event

Courage and resourcefulness are thematic in my talk this week at the fantastic Festival of Marketing. I’ll be looking at how marketers can be bolder in innovation while embracing, respecting and finding smart ways to mitigate the risks involved. There’ll be examples from famous brands like Emirates, Oatly and Spotify – as well as from some entrepreneurial newcomers you’ve never heard of. So, if you happen to be at the festival this Thursday, zigzag your way through the crowd to the Navigating Trends stage and I’ll see you there.