IKEA Hackathon
How to Shape IKEA's Customer Personas
How to implement digital technologies in order to improve the overall customer shopping experience? A sharp digital experience can make a difference. Create an innovative solution to reach digital shoppers.
Company
Platform
Desktop
Industries
Retail
Timeline
Apr. 2018
Background
It was a very long couple of nights at the West Bund Artistic Center in Shanghai. This former aircraft factory hosted us for a different kind of take-off event: IKODE, a tech Hackathon sponsored by IKEA.
Participants in the Hackathon battlefield were all aggressively shortlisted and hand-picked to participate. 18 teams came together with one brief, find new ways of leveraging digital technology to improve IKEA’s customer shopping experience. There was only one rule: make something in 48 hours.
Each team was granted just 180 seconds to sell their idea in front of over 500 domain experts. The judging panel was made up of IKEA leadership, startup CEOs and special guest Jonas Kjellber, Skype Co-founder. This time, the competition was fierce. Our team Oasis 7 emerged victorious in the second prize.
Challenge
You can only select one prepared topic
Only 48 hours for discovering, designing and developing
Only 3mins for showing the project
Build the Team
Our Team
I started with my friend to find the fellows and build a team with 7 members called Oasis 7 before the event start. In the 48 hours, I mainly acted as a product designer and project manager.
My Role
Defined ongoing success metrics and conduct market research
Oversaw the development progress and been in charge of product design
Refine the script and slides to achieve the remarkable pitch
Our Solution
Instead of targeting Ikea’s individual customers directly, team Oasis Seven decided to go with what SAPers are good at providing an enterprise business solution to IKEA to help them better connect with their customers!
In the end, it turned out that our way of thinking is unique. We were the only team out of eighteen finalists to provided a to-B solution. It was one of our keys to success. To quote from the jury, “team Oasis Seven really understands business, and provides a good solution to collect offline customer data”.
The technical solution utilizes face recognition to detect visual clues about visitors including gender, age. This even includes sentiment analysis to understand their mood. We enhance this into a business solution that helps IKEA to collect and analyze visitor insights and therefore find connections between products and people. The results can be accurately applied to the customers, cater to their tastes and preferences.
Collecting Data
It’s an ongoing headache for IKEA to collect and track offline or analog customer data. Most of the visitors that walk into an IKEA store are actually unregistered, anonymous customers. This is a large proportion that heavily affects IKEA’s product positioning and marketing strategy.
By leveraging our face detection technology, we can capture each visitor and recognize whether they are “backend registered” customers. We can build their profile, such as age, gender, and also trace their in-store behaviors.
IKEA stores are already equipped with a comprehensive network of cameras. We utilize this to calculate visitor journeys and the browsing time in each area. It can even detect their mood at each location to see reactions to specific product displays.
Collecting Data
Analyze Data
We turn the captured videos into aggregated and visualized results. We conduct holistic analysis and individual analysis.
Holistic Analysis
Statistical and analytical results may be presented for any time range and any store location, as long as it is covered by a camera. We reveal relations between many key dimensions and natures. For example, we count how many visitors are members, how many of the visitors have been to the store before; we tell the relations between gender and age segments; we show the visitors’ mood distributions; we also calculate the time visitors spend in the area.
Then we further structure and abstract the data and turn it into preference patterns. IKEA products may be labeled by preference tags to understand the connection between preference and segmentation by age or gender or visitor type. So that patterns are abstracted, products and people are linked by preference tags. This could be especially helpful to IKEA forming and shaping their customer personas.
Individual Analysis
We also provide individual member profile analysis. Online members’ previous purchasing records and visit history, combing with the customer persona can clearly shape each member’s preferences and tendencies. With AI playing a part in it, we keep dynamic analysis results to make sure all changes are taken into account.
Customer Insight
Using Data
By having customer personas, IKEA can better customize advertisements, and tailor products, cater to customers’ tastes and preferences. These persona insights can be used in multiple channels, like guiding campaigns and promotions or optimizing store floor displays. In essence, a simplified, engaging and tailored shopping experience is unlocked for all visitors.
Accurate Targeting
