20 Years of IKEA's Catalogue in China — and the 12 Secrets Hidden Inside It

More than a showcase for products and design, the catalogue is IKEA's argument about what a “home” should be — and a powerful piece of values marketing.

As one of the highest-circulation publications in the world, the IKEA Catalogue (《家居指南》) has always been a powerful marketing tool. The company uses it not only to announce new products but to show what it believes an ideal home looks like. In the words of Mikael Ydholm, who runs IKEA's Life at Home research department: “We've always had strong opinions about what a home should be.”

2016 is the tenth year the catalogue has been published in China. Most of the time the Catalogue is tied to IKEA's membership program; last year the number of IKEA members in China grew 42%, to 13.5 million. In a place like Shanghai you can walk into an apartment building and find a copy stuffed into almost every mailbox, as our cover image shows.

Reading the Catalogue is an interesting way to watch how IKEA talks to consumers, how it thinks about “home,” and how it positions itself in the Chinese market. QDaily went through every Catalogue of the past ten years, looking for trends and the reasons behind them. Why IKEA and not some other company? First, no other home-furnishings maker sells such a wide range of product categories at once. Second, IKEA's Catalogue rests on an enormous amount of household research.

IKEA usually takes 13 months to finish one Catalogue. About 100 people work on the initial creative and production stage, all of them from a department called IKEA Communication. Because different markets add local content, more people join later on. The Life at Home research department, where Mikael Ydholm works, used to be a secretive team that did nothing but research. Then it found that more and more people were asking about its methods and conclusions, hoping to prepare for new trends. From 2011, IKEA began treating the disclosure of that work as a selling point in how it talks to the outside world.

There is no single global edition of the IKEA Catalogue. For the 2017 edition, the company produced 70 versions in 32 languages. The China edition carried 13 feature stories — an approach that comes very close to a magazine.

In fact, “more and more like a magazine” is the central change in the Catalogue over the past decade. Compared with the early years, when it simply displayed goods and hammered on price, IKEA now prefers to put across a point of view, or to break up a rigid way of thinking.

Beyond that, we have 11 more findings that may offer some clues to home-furnishing trends and to IKEA as a company.

1. Why Have the Catalogue's Themes Become Less “Specific”?

As one of IKEA's channels for reaching people, the Catalogue's theme is designed around whatever the company's business priorities are at the time. The 2006 China edition differed quite a bit from other editions around the world: it came in five booklets a year, each with its own theme — My Reunion New Year (《我的团圆新年》), The Complete Living Room Guide (《客厅全攻略》), Bedroom, the Comfort I Deserve (《卧室，我应得的舒适享受》) — each pointing squarely at one function or one holiday. From the theme alone you could guess the contents without opening it.

In recent years, the home the Catalogue builds for consumers is no longer pinned to any one room, and readers are no longer asked to follow a “guide” to anything. IKEA has moved from a function-driven approach to the “democratic design” it has been talking about for the past few years, the goal being “to create a better everyday life for the many people.”

The cover of the 2016 catalogue shows what looks like a father and son pouring juice in the kitchen, under the theme “Feel Life in the Small Details.” The 2017 cover shows people of different skin colors and genders sitting around a dining table, under the theme “Designed for Everyone.”

Which suggests that when IKEA enters a market it does not know well, it uses functional, product-led material to win the trust of its target customers quickly. Once people grow familiar with the brand, it switches to material led by brand and ideas, and function fades into the background, taken for granted.

2. Why Does a Product Catalogue Need a Foreword?

The foreword in the first China edition of the Catalogue contained no grand declarations; it was, frankly, unremarkable. It came down to two sentences: IKEA's Chengdu Tianfu store has opened; and please collect your copy of the Guide to Beautiful Home Living (《美好家居指南》, as the Catalogue was then called), the companion to your life at home.

In the years that followed, the foreword varied in length and form, but on the whole it got longer. In 2014, IKEA finally switched from the formal Chinese word for “you” to the casual one, and the forewords after that read noticeably more relaxed and natural. By 2017, what IKEA wanted to say came down to two things: “We design for every ordinary person”; and we have plenty of good ideas for the problems you run into at home.

As Mikael Ydholm put it, IKEA has always had strong opinions about home. The foreword has gradually become the main place where IKEA delivers them, stating plainly what those not-very-specific themes actually mean. And those opinions reappear and are reinforced through the rest of the book.

3. They're All Rooms — So Why Sort Them by Type?

When we set about decorating, we naturally split a home into functional zones. IKEA used to do the same, running things like “The Complete Living Room Guide” and “The Complete Bedroom Guide,” pitching products at each zone: the living room meant sofas and televisions, the bedroom meant beds, wardrobes and drawers. For living-room storage, IKEA would routinely push the long-lived and reliably popular Billy bookcase.

After 2013, IKEA stopped doing this. Apart from the bathroom and the kitchen, what appears in the catalogue is what a space is used for: sleeping, relaxing, eating. It no longer confines an area to a single function, and that will keep being the direction of its work.

Marcus Engman, IKEA's head of design, said: “We're already seeing a lot of people buy a sofa bed instead of a sofa. It's a kind of fluid-home idea.”

The “fluid home” he means can roughly be understood as domestic space that moves around: the living room is not only a place to socialize, it may also become where many people eat and sleep. It was this trend IKEA followed when it blurred the boundaries between areas in the Catalogue.

The World Health Organization predicts that between 2015 and 2020 the world's urban population will grow by an average of 1.84% a year; by 2017 most people will live in cities, and cities will only get more crowded.

In IKEA's main markets — Europe, China and the United States — shrinking living space per person in cities is an increasingly obvious problem. In China, tradition says a home only really counts as a home if you have bought it, but figures from the National Bureau of Statistics show the average sale price of commercial housing nationwide in 2014 was 25.68% higher than in 2010, with first-tier cities rising far faster. Faced with prices this high, many people, especially the young, can only settle for a smaller place.

Living space has shrunk, but life goes on, so some spaces have to do several jobs. The mobile kitchen in the 2017 Catalogue is one example: the apartment in the photograph appears to have no kitchen area of its own, the zones run into one another, and what looks like a large metal frame on wheels sits right next to the sofa.

4. 42 Pages at Most, 11 at Least: How Much Turf Does Each Section Get?

Anders Dahlvig, a former president and chief executive of IKEA, writes in The IKEA Edge (《这就是宜家》) that IKEA, which at the time paid little attention to marketing and had a limited budget for it, decided in 2004 to make the bedroom and the kitchen its priorities: both would get more display space in the stores and more pages in the Catalogue than other areas. The two went on to become the main sources of profit growth for IKEA worldwide. After that, IKEA settled on a strategy of developing a small number of areas first, making money from them and building a lasting advantage — which is why some categories plainly get more pages in the Catalogue than others.

The priority areas are clearly not fixed; IKEA adjusts them as consumer tastes change. By the time the Catalogue reached China, IKEA's focus had already moved to the living room and the bedroom. The categories shifted a little from year to year, but from 2007 to 2012 those two spaces had the most pages, and in the first three years the living-room section alone took more than 20% of the whole book.

After the functions of a space blurred in 2013, the kitchen gradually became the new favorite, and from 2014 its page count passed every other functional area. In 2017 the kitchen had the most pages, 42; the bathroom had the fewest, 11.

5. Why Has the Kitchen Become the Top Priority?

The kitchen, now ahead of every other area on page count, has clearly become an IKEA priority. Of the three installments of the IKEA Life at Home Report published so far, the second is the only one limited to a single space, the kitchen. IKEA interviewed 11,729 people around the world for it, covering every aspect of life in and around the kitchen.

“For the past two years we've been talking about life in and around the kitchen — the kitchen, the dining room, and all the things and food involved in cooking and eating — because we want people to better enjoy eating at home,” IKEA China told QDaily.

People want to raise their quality of life in practical ways, and cooking is a big part of that. The attention paid to the kitchen has grown especially clear in recent years. Around 2012, recipe apps such as Xiachufang began to draw attention, and fresh-food e-commerce, cheaper and more varied than the traditional channels, also grew quickly.

The kitchen has also become a window for showing off your own life. Photographing the cooking and the finished dish and putting it online is now routine for many people. Among respondents to the Life at Home Report, 60% said they watch recipes and cooking videos online, and 30% said they make such content themselves.

Mia Lundström, IKEA's creative director, once said in an interview: “We want to show off our pots and pans.” She estimated that 70% of shoppers want an “island” of their own in the kitchen — a spot where party guests can watch them cook, children can do their homework, and the family can eat together.

That is exactly why the kitchen section shows indoor and outdoor tables and chairs alongside cooking tools. In IKEA's conception the kitchen is not only a place to cook but a place to socialize, or whatever else a consumer wants it to be.

6. After All These Years, the One Constant Is Probably Storage

Another idea IKEA presses in the Catalogue is that whatever the size of the home, it will offer consumers a solution for living well — as the 2012 theme put it: “A home doesn't have to be big, just cleverly designed.”

You can see IKEA's effort here clearly, especially after the catalogue was redesigned, when “storage” became a very important section; being able to find things when you need them is about as basic a need as there is. In every edition of the Catalogue, IKEA shows which pieces of furniture make storage more efficient — storage boxes of all kinds, the space in a hallway or a corner. The section is also a good place to sell IKEA wardrobes: in this year's book, half of the storage pages are given over to wardrobes, which can be read as a continuation of the old focus on the bedroom.

7. What Is IKEA Talking About When It Talks About Style?

Flipping through the catalogue, you may notice that from 2014 IKEA listed “style” on its own — minimalist style, romantic style, eclectic style, and so on. Over the past few years it has shown readers templates for all kinds of styles and color schemes. This is not a matter of chasing fashion blindly.

IKEA carries more than ten thousand products, yet every one of them still fits into a grid of four styles. Clockwise, they are Traditional, International, Modern and Sweden — that is, Scandinavian.

“We put different materials, designs, details, colors and patterns together to produce a harmony that comes out of collision,” read the explanation in the style section of the 2014 Catalogue. That collision follows rules. IKEA staff all go through IKEA style training; in general they pick the large furniture in one style first, then add soft furnishings and small objects from the same quadrant or the one next to it. They will never pick from the opposing style, or the harmony falls apart. The style names are not always printed. The most distinctive one at IKEA is its Sweden style: geometric patterns, strong colors, embroidery and other handwork.

In other words, style has always existed at IKEA. It was not turned into a promotional language and taught to consumers until 2014.

8. Selling Goods, or Selling Possibilities?

The scenes in the Catalogue have grown more detailed in recent years. The older books showed vaguer, more generic situations: this is a bedroom, you sleep here and keep your clothes here, so you need a bed, a wardrobe and so on. Now they take different stages of life and different kinds of household into account: someone sleeping while someone works in the same bedroom; wanting the bedroom to double as a gym; children who want to sleep with their parents; children who share a bedroom but also want space of their own.

These detailed scenes solve real problems for a lot of people, and IKEA tells them which furniture and which tricks will do it. IKEA can raise questions this practical and this specific in the Catalogue because it keeps studying real cases as they happen — in the Life at Home Report we have written about before, IKEA interviewed Juliette, who lives in Shanghai with friends and two dogs.

Ydholm told QDaily: “Inside IKEA, to be more effective and more efficient, we keep restructuring the organization, and we are always researching every aspect of people's lives in all sorts of different ways.”

IKEA did not always work this way. After it entered the American market in 1985, it did not even convert its measurements from centimeters to the inches Americans use — and duly failed. In 1992 IKEA decided to do something it had rarely done before: take market research seriously.

Research is now one of the things IKEA's success rests on. Visiting households in Shenzhen, for instance, its staff found that a lot of people sit on the floor and use the sofa as a backrest — something nobody at IKEA had imagined before the research. As a multinational trying to keep costs down, IKEA wants its products to cover as many of the possibilities it can find around the world, and research is what gets it there.

9. For Years IKEA Kept Stressing Its Value for Money. Now You Barely Notice It. Why?

When IKEA first published the Catalogue in China in 2007, it kept insisting on how cheap its products were: open it and you immediately saw a red, spiky starburst with the words “low price” on a yellow ground, just like a flyer you'd pick up at the supermarket. Back then IKEA mostly just stamped prices on the products, bluntly, and the captions followed the same logic. Beside the 129-yuan Sangjia table trolley it read: “Once I spent 129 yuan and got only a very small bottle of perfume.”

Right through the 2012 Catalogue, IKEA kept the discounted goods at the front of the book, in the most prominent spot. But when you opened the first page of the 2013 Catalogue, the first line read: “Welcome to a world full of ideas.”

Between 2006 and 2012, Chinese consumers' incomes rose a great deal. Figures from the National Bureau of Statistics show per-capita disposable income for urban households rising from 11,759.5 yuan to 24,564.7 yuan, more than double. The middle class kept growing, and what it wanted was no longer to meet daily needs but to live better.

IKEA noticed this too, and the Catalogues that followed stopped telling consumers only how cheap the products were and started talking about what consumers needed. Bored with the look of your home and wanting a change? Buy a sofa with a removable cover: “Just change the cover and it feels like a whole new sofa.” Or give a strictly practical kitchen a “soft side” with a few kitchen towels.

10. Why Run Interviews?

This year's Catalogue carried a section that had never appeared before: feature articles. It looks almost exactly like a magazine — a big headline, a summary under the headline, a drop cap at the start, space set aside to pull out the important sentences, and photographs and captions arranged with some rhythm.

The articles are not all about IKEA; two of them together mention the word “IKEA” once. The Definition of Home (《家的定义》) asks four people living in completely different circumstances what home means to them; An Inspired Approach to Improvised Cooking (《充满灵感的即兴烹饪方法》) is about Jonah Reider, a student who likes to cook on impulse.

Plenty of Chinese furniture brands put out similar promotional booklets; or open Taobao, search for “Nordic furniture,” and you will find promotional images much like the Catalogue's, with staged scenes and people inside them. For those brands, though, it stops at promoting the product.

What IKEA sells its consumers is not only a product but a way of living, and the interviews are one expression of that. Mette Hay and Rolf Hay, founders of the Danish design brand Hay, have said that IKEA's stores are helping Chinese consumers acquire a taste for contemporary design. Mette said: “They are teaching people how to make a beautiful home, and I believe they are helping us.”

11. What Does IKEA Say When It Talks About Itself?

The way IKEA describes itself has kept changing too.

In 2008 it wrote three paragraphs under the heading “IKEA, from Sweden,” introducing the Swedish way of life and Swedish design. In 2009 IKEA described what a Swedish home is like, and said: “Isn't it interesting that the things we see as Swedish seem to be appreciated by people all over the world?”

In 2010 IKEA recalled its store in Småland, in southern Sweden, and the traditions there. In 2011, though, it chose to stress that it is a “supplier to the Swedish royal court,” able to provide whatever is needed whether the customer lives in a dormitory or a castle.

In 2014, alongside the designers explaining their thinking as usual, IKEA also brought in employees from sales, product planning and other roles to talk about things beyond the products. This was even more obvious in 2017, when the short introductions became full feature articles.

12. What Never Changes at the End?

At the end of the Catalogue, the one constant is that it urges you to come shopping at IKEA. The method differs from book to book, because there are more and more ways to get to know IKEA; what does not change is that there is always information about the stores. In 2007, when there were only four, IKEA drew a map of each one; by 2017 that had become detailed written information about 21 stores.

The Catalogue can also be read as an after-sales handbook. Before 2013 IKEA printed assembly diagrams for its various products; the diagrams have since gone, but it still keeps the notes on products carrying an “X-year quality guarantee,” along with every way of contacting IKEA.

IKEA's e-commerce business in China has begun a trial in Shanghai, but the stores have always been its most important sales channel and its most important advertising space, and from the first page to the last the Catalogue tells readers to go and try things in the store, where there are more solutions than the ones shown here. Whatever happens to this book in the future, IKEA will presumably still want you to come and wander around the store — and to eat at the IKEA restaurant that no edition leaves out.

Graphics: Wu Lingwei

Cover image: The Everygirl