IKEA’s fuss over catalogue font change: Do Customers Care?
// Posted in Social Media by Rene Zuleta on 09.11.09.
IKEA catalogue
This year there was a big fuss over Ikea’s decision to switch its catalogue font from Futura to the more practical (and cheaper) Verdana. The discussion is now known as the “Verdanagate”.
The interesting part of this is that the fuss itself brought interesting topics to discuss such as if passionate fans are worth listening to. Social media such as Twitter and Facebook are certainly important and can have great impact on customer’s decisions and perception over a company. But how much should companies listen to all the hype?
In a very good post, Chris Bailey, asks whether the (largely online, heavily Tweeted) outcries of those who consider the widely-used Verdana the work of the devil should worry Ikea’s customer-service reps at all.
It would seem not. As Bailey discovers with a bit of research, at IKEAFANS, an online and unofficial online fanclub for the Swedish furniture chain, the switch of font has generated “zero chatter”.
In other words:
those design purists who take issue with the font change may not (probably aren’t) Ikea’s loyal shoppers.
If Bailey is right, the whole storm-in-a-teacup has revealed a more persistent problem to do with social media.
As enamoured as we are of social media’s immediacy, that reliance on rapid responses may preclude deeper consideration of the points raised. In other words, we make be taking decisions too fast based on what we see in social media.
Should corporates relent if the blogosphere comes down too heavily on their branding choices? Pepsi dropped its Tropicana re-brand after the public gave it the thumbs down, and the Ikea drama’s already earned itself an entry on Wikipedia, which might be enough to ruffle any brand manager’s composure.
Twitter’s users number in the millions, Facebook’s in the hundreds of millions — so it’s hardly surprising businesses are actively encouraged to build their social media profiles so they can listen and respond to customers. How they should respond is largely unproven.
Is it smart, for example, to use Twitter as “an early warning system to detect trouble coming over the hill”? While it appears to be working for some, it’s easy to see how a business could start running up blind alleys and become snagged on issues that are not core to its customer service.
In Ikeas’s case, among the flat-pack fan club, it’ll take more than a font alteration to dent their ardour. As one IKEAFAN comment goes, “as long as they don’t change the core of their business - economical, trendy, easy to build furniture and household items, I could give a flying rats butt on what font they choose to use on their catalogue”.
Very clear
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