Instead of cafe

Objective: According to researches, food is an integral part of Russian culture and everyday life: Russians like to gather around the table and express warm feelings to their loved ones when sharing food. For target audience of IKEA there is a lot more to food than food. It’s about being together, about creativity, about personality, about expressing your feeling to your loved ones, celebrating everyday and special moments. But from the research we found out that currently Russians are influenced by lots of stereotypes that prevent them from truly enjoying everyday life around food. But sometimes they tend to compromise on it due to various reasons: small space, low budget, existing stereotypes and opinions.   The objectives were to challenge these conventions and inspire people with new ideas how to cook, eat and socialize without compromises. The INSTEAD OF CAFE campaign was planned to be long-term activity to give everyone an opportunity to visit it.

Idea: We created unique experiential venues with IKEA kitchens in the center of Moscow and St-Pete – called INSTEAD OF CAFE “NEW IDEAS TO EAT’”. Everyone can book a kitchen they like for their families and friends online for free and then come there to cook, to celebrate any occasion or just spend a great time with their families and friends in a true home atmosphere. Also we help them to arrange thematic parties – to provide serving ideas, decorations etc. With all those activities we enable people to experientially prove themselves that they can create a better everyday life with food in their homes without compromising. Every kitchen was built to break a stereotype about life in and around kitchen.

Results:

Over 48 277 visitors, and 6805 of them enjoyed cooking on the kitchens

300 000 people virtually visited INSTEAD OF CAFE and learned about IKEA kitchen solutions   

238 journalists came to INSTEAD OF café   

20 885 publications   

95085261 audince   

The sales results went up:

For Cooking category 43%

For Eating category 37%

Next project
New Year workshop 2016