Dog Spotting at IKEA Singapore

trendz_web_issue3_2014_ikea Heart-wrenching videos of animals stuck in small cages while soft music plays in the background is a common formula for organizations promoting pet adoptions. Ikea Singapore, though, took a lighter approach when it joined Home for Hope, a collective project that nonprofits Save our Street Dogs (SOSD) and Animal Lovers League launched this past spring. It placed life-size cardboard cutouts of homeless pets throughout its showroom, each one bearing a collar with a QR code tag for shoppers to scan to find out more about dogs waiting for adoption.

If anything, the project showed the potential of purposeful visual merchandising in a brick-and-mortar environment as support for video PSAs and its ability to deliver a message to target consumers in a way that social media had not been able to do. According to a SOSD officer, Facebook, for example, had only managed to preach to the converted, attracting likes from animal lovers who were already dog owners and were not in a position to adopt any more pets. Reaching out to people while they were already thinking about enhancing their homes was more effective. The presence of a pet, in addition to nice furnishings and decorative art, could really transform and warm up a home; that was the lesson in all of this.

Ikea’s participation in the Home for Hope project attracted enough attention to move another five furniture stores to donate space to further the homeless animal cause: Foundry, Grafunkt, Commune, Journey East, and Noden Collective.

Would-be pet adopters will find data sheets on each available dog, as well as links to project partner pages, on the collective’s website at http://HomeForHope.sg.