"If you are a man and find yourself at IKEA, you have lost control over your wife." – the social web is an almost endless source of the ever-lasting conflict of men, women and the need for home decoration. Men and IKEA shopping just don't go well together. But women reveal the truth on twitter: "My boyfriend likes to go to IKEA, he just can't show it."
For world peace and the sake of it, we reacted and finally made spending a Saturday at IKEA socially acceptable for guys. We invented Mänland. The drop-off-pick-up station in front of the store to hand in your partner. Like Småland for kids, Mänland is a place tailored to the needs of the modern man.
Activities like high-speed screw driving and slipper kick-throwing turned the former shopping maze marathon into amusing pastimes with new-found best buddies.
After hours of joy and happiness, all ladies (and of course, in some cases men) picked up their partners to let them take care of what they really came for: to carry and pack all the stuff into the car.
We finally answer the biggest need since the dawn of social media. Creating a place where man can just be man. At IKEA. In, like, ...real-time.
And real real-time action is a tough job: For weeks, we tracked the social web to find the geo-locations generating the most comments, tweets and posts about the gender shopping crisis – and sent the Mänland truck to the areas that need it the most. So, to cover a whole country, we had to be fast and online 24/7. We did it. And it was damn worth it!
Some hard facts:
Officially, we're not allowed to say that we decreased the divorce rate in Germany, well…
As a favourable side effect, shoppers posted the in-store radio announcements online: "The chubby little 43 years old Peter is waiting to be picked up at Mänland". Mission accomplished.
