How IKEA Evolved Its Strategy While Keeping Its Culture Constant

HANNAH BATES: Welcome to HBR On Strategy, case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock new ways of doing business. The Swedish furniture maker IKEA found huge success producing quality furniture at affordable prices. But in 2017, they were at a crossroads. Their beloved founder had died, and the exponential rise of online shopping posed a new challenge. Today, we bring you a conversation about how to develop, select, and embrace a new strategic initiative – with Harvard Business School professors Juan Alcacer and Cynthia Montgomery. They studied how IKEA made big changes for the future while fortifying its internal culture and its external identity. In this episode, you’ll learn how the company reworked its franchise agreements to create a more managerial and modern culture, and ensure consistency among its global stores. You’ll also learn how they balanced global growth with localization – including new supply chains. This episode originally aired on Cold Call in June 2021. Here it is.

BRIAN KENNY: For some of the world’s most celebrated founders, the entrepreneurial drive kicks off at an early age. Mark Zuckerberg developed Facebook in his Harvard dorm room at the age of 18. Michael Dell made $200,000 upgrading computers in his first year of business, he was 19. Before Jack Dorsey founded Twitter, he created a dispatch routing platform for taxis in his hometown of St. Louis, while he was in middle school. But then there’s Ingvar Kamprad who began selling matches at the age of five to neighbors in his rural Swedish homestead. By the age of seven, he was buying matches in bulk in Stockholm and selling them at a profit back home. Ingvar learned early on that you can sell things at a low price and still make a good profit. A philosophy that fueled the success of his next business venture, IKEA. Today on Cold Call, we welcome professors, Juan Alcacer, and Cynthia Montgomery to discuss their case entitled, “What IKEA Do We Want?” I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’re listening to Cold Call on the HBR Presents network. Juan Alcacer’s research focuses on the international strategies of firms in the telecommunications industry and Cynthia Montgomery studies the unique roles leaders play in developing and implementing strategy. They are both members of the Strategy unit at Harvard Business School. And thank you both for joining me today. It’s great to have you on the show.

CYNTHIA MONTGOMERY: Thanks Brian.

JUAN ALCACER: Thank you for having us.

BRIAN KENNY: You’re both here for the first time, so we’ll try and make it painless so we can get you to come back on. I think people are going to love hearing about IKEA and getting an inside view. Most of us have had that experience of being like mice in a maze. When you go into an IKEA store, you are compelled to walk through the whole place. It’s really brilliant, so many of the touches and things that they’ve done. And this case helps to shine a light, I think, on some of those decisions and how they were made. I had no idea how old the company was. So just starting with its history, it’s going to be good to hear about that. Juan, I want you to start, if you could, by telling us what would your cold call be to start this case in the classroom?

JUAN ALCACER: I like to start the case, bringing in the emotions of the students and their relationship with IKEA. So most of our students have had some experience with IKEA. So I’d just start asking how many of you have been in IKEA, and then I’d start asking why? Why did you go to IKEA? And this time telling you all the things that you just mentioned, for instance, walking through the maze, going to eat the meatballs. So they started bringing all these small, decisions that were made through the years, that made IKEA, IKEA.

BRIAN KENNY: Who doesn’t love the meatballs? Cynthia, let me ask you, you’re both in the Strategy unit at Harvard Business School, there’s a lot of strategy underlying this whole case. I’m curious as to what made you decide to look at IKEA and sort of, how does it relate to your scholarship and the things that you think about; the questions you try to answer?

CYNTHIA MONTGOMERY: I’m really interested in the choices firms make about who they will be and why they will matter? The core questions at the identity of a company. In 1976 Kamprad laid out very, very carefully. What IKEA would do, who it would be. He identified its product range. The customers it would serve, the company’s pricing policy, all in a document called, The Testament of a Furniture Dealer. And he described it as, “the essence of our work.” And 45 years later, it was still required reading for all of the IKEA’s employees. It’s probably the most compelling statement of corporate purpose I’ve ever seen.

BRIAN KENNY: Remarkable in a company that’s based on furniture. It was a very, sort of powerful thing. There’s an exhibit in the case that shows the whole Testament. Maybe we can dig a little bit into the history here. I alluded to the fact that it’s been around for a long time. Cynthia, just tell us a little bit about how the company came to be and how it evolved over time.

CYNTHIA MONTGOMERY: IKEA started actually as a mail-order business in Sweden and in the late 1940s Kamprad noticed that despite a lot of demand for furniture, agreements between the furniture manufacturers and retailers were keeping furniture prices real high. He was interested in a different set of customers. And he decided that to attract farmers and working class customers, he needed to be able to offer quality furniture at lower prices.

BRIAN KENNY: What were some of the early challenges that they faced. I’m also curious a little bit about the Swedish culture and how that sort of factors in here. Because there was definitely undertones of that factoring into the way they set this up.

CYNTHIA MONTGOMERY: It’s a virtue to be frugal and to be very careful about how you spend your money. And that made a huge impression, particularly given his background, growing up on a farm for Kamprad, he decided he really wanted to lower the prices of furniture and began to do so. And it turned out that there was a very, very strong response from other furniture manufacturers who basically said that they were going to boycott him. They wouldn’t allow him into their furniture fairs, him personally, as well as his company. And so in turn, what happened was that they also pressured local suppliers not to sell to a IKEA anymore, basically trying to force him out of the market. And what happened was that that actually drove Kamprad to Poland as a source of supply because local firms wouldn’t supply him anymore. And in the process, he discovered that Polish manufacturers could actually make furniture at far, far lower costs than Swedish manufacturers. And that essentially gave IKEA a cost structure that was more like a difference in kind, than a difference in degree. And that proved enormously important to building almost insurmountable competitive advantage for IKEA.

BRIAN KENNY: He was also really keen with innovations early on that things like the restaurant area and the childcare space, what were some of the insights that drove him to make those kinds of decisions?

CYNTHIA MONTGOMERY: One of the things that he decided quite early on is that he wanted to have the stores located out of town. And the reason is because land there was much, much cheaper. So he built these ,as you described earlier, Brian, these gigantic stores on the outskirts of town and they had lots and lots of square footage and lots and lots of merchandise, but you know, it took time to get there. It took time to shop there and what he wanted to do was make it worth it for the customers to make the trip, worth it for them to spend a lot of time in the stores. So he decided to add restaurants and the now famous meatballs, which come in several flavors, actually around the world, and to add childcare centers that would care for young children while the parents shopped. On the low cost front, he was innovative in other ways, he actually borrowed the idea of flat pack from another innovator, but he’s the one that actually brought it to life in such a big way. Then he discovered that if you let the clients go in and pick off the furniture packs themselves, they could even save more money and lower the costs in the store.

BRIAN KENNY: So they have a pretty complicated org structure, when we start to dig into some of the nuance of the case. Juan, could you describe for us, how they’re set up from an org structure standpoint?

JUAN ALCACER: You have to realize that coming from Sweden, which is one of the countries with the highest taxation for corporations in the world. So early on, they decided to find some organization structure and legal structure that would allow them to lower taxes. And that created basically an ownership based on foundations, based in the Netherlands. And they decided, early on, to separate the company into pieces. One is the franchise store, which is basically running the brand and running the management image of the brand. And then the operational part of the company, which is a franchisee. And for many years, those two things were separated. The franchisee was also in charge of manufacturing and so forth. So it was a very strange structure, that was put in place in part by the charisma and the leadership style of Ingvar Kamprad. If I can go back to your question about the Swedish culture. One of the things that, at least for me, is very striking is that when you look at multinationals, there’s a thing called the liability of being a foreigner, which means that when you go to another country, you have some disadvantages. And you try to mitigate that liability of being a foreigner, by pretending to be of that particular country. IKEA went with a totally different approach, they’re totally Swedish. Names of their products are impossible to pronounce. The fact that they have meatballs, they have their Swedish flags all over the place. They embrace the Swedish spirit as a part of the brand. You don’t see many multinationals with that. That makes IKEA what it is today.

BRIAN KENNY: I definitely think that’s part of the appeal here in the US, for sure, is people being exposed to the Swedish culture in a way they never had before. What is the culture of the company like, what’s it like to work there?

JUAN ALCACER: We went to both the Netherlands and to Sweden and we had a great time. It’s a very egalitarian culture. All the VP’s, high-level managers, none of them have an assistant. Only the CEO has an assistant. They don’t have offices, so everybody shares an open space. The whole place is decorated with IKEA furniture, everybody talks to each other by their first name. It’s very collegial, very friendly.

CYNTHIA MONTGOMERY: I would add to that. I think IKEA was incredibly generous to us, in the sense that they shared all kinds of confidential, internal documents and were really willing to talk in a very open and forthright way, about both their strengths and their challenges, which was incredibly refreshing. And as Juan said, that it was very egalitarian, and not surprisingly IKEA was one of the first companies to embrace democratic design. And that spirit was everywhere in the company.

BRIAN KENNY: Cynthia, what would you say are some of the keys to their success over the years?

CYNTHIA MONTGOMERY: I’d say that IKEA basically picked a lane and stuck with it. They had clarified, as I said at the top of the show, very, very carefully about what they wanted to do, who they wanted to be. And what they said is, look, this is what we’re going to be about. We’re going to offer an extensive range of practical, well-designed furnishings at low prices. And we’re going to serve the many, not the few. And the many are those with limited financial resources. When you have such clarity about what you want to do, then you can set out and try to maximize how you approach that. Essentially IKEA built a system, to do exactly that, extremely well and their distinctiveness made them truly an iconic firm. And it’s great when you talk with students about, what’s the purpose of your business?, What are you doing? What’s interesting is that oftentimes they can describe much more carefully what IKEA is doing, than what their own businesses doing. The last thing I would add, is that as Juan one said, they’re really synonymous with Sweden and they put that right out there. It’s almost like the way that Coca-Cola is synonymous with the US. And that has been a big part of their advantage.

BRIAN KENNY: Okay. So we’ve painted a very rosy picture for IKEA, but it’s an HBS case. So there’s tension, inevitably. So let’s dig in a little bit to where the case brings us. I’m going to mispronounce his name. I hope I don’t, but Torbjörn Lööf is that close?

CYNTHIA MONTGOMERY: Yeah.

BRIAN KENNY: He is the protagonist in the case. And he is stepping into a leadership role here really after an iconic leader has stepped back and that’s a challenge. Any time that happens, and a leader has to step in. And as he starts to sort of peek underneath the hood a little bit, he starts to see some of the challenges that IKEA is facing in this now seventh decade, I guess, of their existence. So Juan, maybe you can set that up for us a little bit.

JUAN ALCACER: It’s not only that he is stepping in the shadow of a leader that created the company. It’s that the company is still controlled by the family. So this is not a public firm, this is a private firm. So, he had to basically walk a very, very thin line, trying to take IKEA towards the future, but still preserving the past. And he had basically two main tasks, one is short term, that organization restructure that we were talking about, that was very complicated was created products. As I said before, the franchisee, which is basically the one that was running all the operations, was also the manufacturer. But there were other franchises. So for instance, the operations in Middle East are run by another company. So they wanted to create a system of transparency, that all the franchises are run the same way. When you have a franchisee that has basically represented 80% of your sales, and the ones that are representing 2% or 3%, there is an imbalance of power. So they tried to create a structure that is more managerial, that is more modern, that will allow to create incentives for new franchisees to come into the system. So that transaction was basically transferring production and transferring the functions that were in the franchisee back to the franchisor. There were 25,000 people that have to move from one place to another.

BRIAN KENNY: Wow.

JUAN ALCACER: They didn’t move physically, but in terms of the legal status they shift around. And the second is to bring IKEA to the world. What they observed is that there were some changes in demographics, they were targeting the low-income, what they call the thin wallets of the world, but it turned out that people that would go to IKEA are not thin wallets anymore. These people have already moved towards the middle-class and they also have this whole, to increase the number of consumers to three billion, and that meant that they have to basically grow globally, at a rate that they have never done, before they had two or three markets, like China and India. They also have the issue of eCommerce, to pick up and every retailer in the world is dealing with that. So, it’s two steps. One, getting the house in order, and second one, creating a path for the future for IKEA to become an icon for the next 75 years.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. And I also think at some level it’s hard to sustain that original mission that they set out with, when you’re trying to expand so rapidly and bring in a much larger audience. Cynthia, I don’t know if you have other observations about these changes they were facing.

CYNTHIA MONTGOMERY: Absolutely. Because one thing is that you can look at the challenges that came from expanding into new geographies. But the other thing that they found in a large study that they did, is that there were challenges in their core business as well, that the countries they’d been in for a number of years, and what I’ll call the big blue box stores, mostly in developed countries. What they found is that increasingly many of their customers in those markets wanted new conveniences. They wanted stores that were located closer to city centers because a number of people say in their late twenties, early thirties are not driving and don’t have cars. And they found that there was an increasing demand for delivery and assembly services for shopping online. These trends are worrying to a huge number of retailers, but particularly a challenge to IKEA because low price, low, low price, so low that that people can recognize the difference. That being at the heart of their strategy. And customers’ willingness to spend time getting to the store, hauling furniture about, ultimately assembling it. Those are at the very, very heart of their low-cost strategy and their very distinctive value proposition. It was a big challenge within the developed markets as well.

BRIAN KENNY: And depending on where they went in the world, a different set of challenges pops up almost everywhere. Juan, you mentioned earlier that they pushed back against localization, but is that a sustainable strategy? When you’re trying to go into entirely new markets like China and India.

JUAN ALCACER: The beauty of IKEA is that they found a segment across different cultures that was very similar. College students the United States, that needed to have furniture for a few years only, it could be young couples that are opening a new house, in some places it’s immigrants that are moving from one country to another country that need to buy furniture, but they don’t have the money to do so. So there was this very common segment across the world that they were able to then define, that allows them to have basically 80% of their line, of their range, is common across countries. And they have around 10% to 20% that varies by country. Now, when they go to China, and they go to India, they find that the changes have to be of a higher scale for three reasons. One, the tastes are different, also the materials, when you are going to India and you are going to houses that are in a high humidity environment, the type of wood that you can use is different. Now you start, not only changing the look of the product but you also have to change how you made it. And the third big challenge is when you look at what is defined as thin wallet, in these markets, is really thin. It’s not thin wallet in Sweden, it’s not thin wallet in the United States. So, you have to go to prices that are really, really low. And that means that you are already a low cost producer but you have to go even lower. That means that you have to change your supplier, so it starts changing the fundamental parts of the business model that they created through the years.

BRIAN KENNY: And it could probably, pretty easily, get away from you. So this does call for a strategy. Cynthia, can you describe for us what the three roads forward are? This was sort of underpinned their strategy going forward and how they were going to deal with some of these challenges.

CYNTHIA MONTGOMERY: Basically, the three roads, the first was affordability, as Juan said, this isn’t affordability in the way that they, at the level at which they’ve traditionally thought about it. This is affordability for wallets that are either very thin or actually where the willingness to pay just isn’t as high, because they’re accustomed to having goods that are at very low prices. So they wanted to attack affordability for people who could not afford IKEA today. They cared a lot about accessibility. They’ve got to reach and interact with people where they are. And the last is sustainability, and they felt really, really strongly about this. And I think much in line with what you see with a number of other countries in Europe, that they cared a lot about the sustainability of the products and wanted to make a positive impact for people, society and the planet. And they’re taking on all three of these aspirations at once.

BRIAN KENNY: You have written many cases, I’m sure that parallel this, what are some other firms that have faced similar challenges and maybe figured out a way to deal with the same sets of challenges?

JUAN ALCACER: The challenge of going overseas, we didn’t write cases about multinationals for many years. They always have this tension between coordination in headquarters and adaptability in each one of the subsidiaries. So IKEA was very good at playing that game for many, many years. In a way they were going to countries that were somehow similar to Sweden. Now that they are venturing to countries that are farther away in many dimensions, not only physically, but also in terms of economic distribution, in terms of taste. They are seeing this tension to be amplified. We have seen that in many companies, Procter and Gamble has been doing that for years and years, Unilever has been doing that for years and years. IKEA has done it for 75 years. They went overseas very early on. But now the challenge is a little bit higher. The other challenge is that Cynthia also mentioned, which is basically adapting to new technologies and new demographics. Every retailer is facing that. Any supermarket, any chain that has been selling in brick and mortar is facing those challenges. So, what is interesting about IKEA is that they are facing these all at the same time and they’re facing this during the process of transition from the leader that created the company to a new set of managers that are more professional and are not part of the family.

BRIAN KENNY: You mentioned technology. I’m just curious, the role that the internet plays in this, because now everybody can see, you know, through YouTube and other things, what the experience is like from one place to the other, and how important is consistency across all those geographies, versus a little bit of localization to make it feel a little bit more like this is the China version of IKEA versus the European version of IKEA. Cynthia, do you have thoughts on that?

CYNTHIA MONTGOMERY: That’s the real challenge here in the sense that, how do you take this whole model that has been developed over so many years? And it’s very, very hard to imitate, which has given them a lot of strength over the years, but when the environment changes, instead of responding in a piecemeal way to all kinds of external stimuli, it’s how do you take this whole model and evolve it in some coherent way that stays true to the iconic sense of who IKEA is? I really see it fundamentally, as an existential question for IKEA.

BRIAN KENNY: Such a great point. Look, I want to thank both of you. This has been a really interesting discussion about a brand that we all know and have experienced many times firsthand. I have one more question for each of you before we part ways. And that would be if there’s one thing you want people to take away from this case, what would it be? Juan, let’s start with you.

JUAN ALCACER: What I would like listeners to take from this, is we have this mentality of growth, growth, growth, and expanding and doing different things, and when you look at IKEA, you have to wonder, is it better that IKEA stays doing what they do well, or do they have to keep growing and entering all these markets and adapt to overseas. We have this basic assumption that growth at any cost should be the goal. I would like the listeners, when they look at the case and think about the cases, to question that very basic assumption.

BRIAN KENNY: Cynthia?

CYNTHIA MONTGOMERY: One of the things about IKEA that I think it’s really, really important to know is that they really brought something different to the world and they did it in a very compelling way. So at the heart, to do something that’s distinctive, that adds value. It comes through really strong in the IKEA story. At the same time, when the environment changes, how do you evolve, is really challenging. And so the fact that they’re being so open in how they’re confronting this, I think there’s a lot to learn there. It’s a challenge. I think it’s really important to remember what’s at the heart of this company, is that they’re really bringing something that’s very unique and they need to continue to do that.

BRIAN KENNY: Juan Alcacer, Cynthia Montgomery, thank you so much for joining me. The case is called, “What IKEA do we want?” Thanks again.

CYNTHIA MONTGOMERY: Thanks Brian.

JUAN ALCACER: Thank you.

HANNAH BATES: You just heard Harvard Business School professors Juan Alcacer and Cynthia Montgomery in conversation with Brian Kenny on Cold Call.  We’ll be back next Wednesday with another hand-picked conversation about business strategy from the Harvard Business Review. If you found this episode helpful, share it with your friends and colleagues, and follow our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you’re there, be sure to leave us a review. We’re a production of the Harvard Business Review. If you want more podcasts, articles, case studies, books, and videos like this, find it all at HBR dot org. This episode was produced by Anne Saini, and me, Hannah Bates. Ian Fox is our editor. Special thanks to Maureen Hoch, Adi Ignatius, Karen Player, Ramsey Khabbaz, Nicole Smith, Anne Bartholomew, and you – our listener. See you next week.