Ramblings of a Marketing Gurl: IKEA Newsletter

Today I signed up for IKEA's customer newsletter...as an 120-year old person. Seriously! That's the earliest birth year (1895) that was offered on their sign-up page. It's hard to imagine a 120-year old putting together anything from IKEA. It was the lengthiest, multi-page sign-up I have seen from a consumer catalog company.

IKEA newsletter sign-up, birth year start

IKEA newsletter sign-up, birth year end

It could be that when the e-newsletter sign-up page was first produced, back at the dawn of the commercial internet, 1895 was a possible year for a date of birth. But then, there is also a top range part of the birth year and for IKEA, it's 1997 (or you'd be turning 18 in 2015). It begs the question.. why not just have birth month and birth day like most consumer companies? Why would you target a specific demographic like 18-120 yrs old.

I'll have to see if I can change my birth month from December to something earlier in the year like July to see if they have a birth year-specific marketing campaign. It would be really surprising to get a "happy 121st birthday!" note from IKEA as a result of this albeit flawed email newsletter sign-up form.

Serena Y. Hsi, MBA

Welcome to my ramblings about marketing techniques, insights, business models, and perspectives on what companies do to bring products and services to market. My marketing work encompasses corporate and agency marketing handling many aspects within the marketing discipline: competitive intelligence, market strategy, market research, consulting, customer segmentation, database marketing, and identifying better customer acquisition methods and cross-sell opportunities.

The strength of a company's product or services should be as strong as its business strategy and marketing insight into its own industry. My passions are marketing and technology, which just happens to also be my career path.