DUBAI 13 February 2020: Since Ikea stores around the world tend to be located on the outskirts of the cities, people spend a lot of time travelling to their nearest store, treating it more like a destination in itself.
Ikea takes this brand loyalty seriously and in fact, the motivation for opening Dubai’s second store was so that customers living nearer to Jebel Ali would not have as far to travel for their Ikea shopping experience.
In addition to thanking their customers with a brand new store, Ikea wanted to reward them for all the time and effort they have invested over the years getting to Ikea with a novel way of paying for products.
Called ‘Buy With Your Time’, Ikea changed their product prices into ‘time currency’ prices based on the average Dubai salary*. It mean’t that customers were able to buy products with all the time they have spent over the years travelling to Ikea.
Thanks to Google Maps timeline, a function that records past routes taken, customers were able to show how many minutes they had spent on previous Ikea journeys. This accumulated time was converted into currency to allow customers to spend it on Ikea products.
