edvardsson.lessons_from_ikea sustainable_business

Values-based service experience 51 In addition to consulting IKEA staff, customers in experience rooms often discuss matters with one another. They also have access to a large database containing information about different sizes, colours, and so on.

Furniture can also be placed in an experience room that is the same size as the customer’s room. This promotes an enhanced form of ‘hyperreality’ to illustrate solutions to real-life problems at home.

In a personal interview with the authors, an IKEA communications manager at regional level made the following observations about the IKEA approach to ‘experience rooms’: We have everything under one roof and we carefully create a space and show solutions to the customers … to make their lives at home better.

[We show them] how they can set up their room, how they can arrange their furniture, how they can light up their room, [and we provide] tips and ideas about how they can improve their room. It can be a living room … a kitchen or … a bedroom… [all] different spaces within the house where we try to show how our expertise and products can create a better environment in their home … We are able to do this because of the wide range of products that we are selling. We are able to put them together in an attractive way. We try to keep it fresh and thus provide a new experience to the customers every time. It is very much based on reality … We try to be as close to reality as we can … in a store.

The experience rooms combine functionality with emotional involvement to create a favourable customer experience. The ‘hyperreality’ is perceived to be true reality through a combination of furniture, decoration, and service.

Both cognitive and affective mental faculties are involved in creating the experiences. It is not quite a real-life situation (or as IKEA puts it ‘an everyday life situation’) but the ‘hyperreality’ of the experience room does approximate to the customers’ daily life experiences. The rooms provide inspiration, encourage interaction, and provoke discussion.

Design dimensions used by IKEA Physical artefacts The physical artefacts used by IKEA include furniture, fabrics, glasses, candles, plates, layout, and signs. These physical artefacts are utilised to create the illusion of being in the various rooms of a home. Space, light, and ambient temperature also contribute to this illusion.

Another role of the physical artefacts is to guide customers through the store and into the warehouse, where the products are picked up by the