Target Market - Assignment Example

IKEA doesn’t just provide its clientele with high quality, low cost furniture; they also offer their clients delicious food from their restaurant, and provide transportation for larger items. IKEA’s in store revenue has been inclining quite steadily, and there has been a 9.8% increase on their online retail store, a 7.4% increase on online furniture category sales and a 2.9% increase in its total furniture sales throughout all their distribution channels (Fig 1). In order for IKEA to keep growing, and remain competitive is to provide a service that is readily available to the majority of the market, that service can be easily made available as a mobile and tablet application.

As part of the New IKEA Virtual Furniture Application, our team intends to integrate: the whole online catalogue (approx. 10,000 products), BESTA Planner (which is a feature on the IKEA website that allows the customer to design the colour, style and format of any of IKEA’s furniture’s), Create Cozy (which is another feature on the IKEA website that lets you design the layout of a room), ability to input dimensions (this feature will allow the customer to input the dimensions of their wall/room in order to distinguish if a piece of furniture is too large for that section of the room, see (Fig 3.)) The application will come in bended with a new feature called Draw Furniture which allows the customer to draw their own furniture and decide its dimensions and colours, and the feature will automatically select the closest furniture (from its online catalogue) that matches the dimensions and style of the furniture drawn.

If the furniture drawn does not have any matches, IKEA will promptly build it upon payment. (See Fig below for preview) The Android OS Smartphones are currently dominating the Smart Phone Market Share at 36% and the Apple I-OS is at 27% total market share (Fig 2). Now Windows Mobile is only just reaching 10%, but they’re mobile phones are increasing in processor speeds and storage space which will have a major increase in its future users. The IKEA will be made a multi-platform application making it available to the Android OS, Apple I-OS and the Windows Smart Phones, making it available to a total of 74% of the total Smart Phone Market.

A rental scheme will also be introduced for selected customers by making selected mobile smart phones and tablets available to rent to enhance the shopping experience and promote loyalty towards IKEA and also a way of goodwill from IKEA. Competition Our investigation has specified that there are currently no other retail applications offering all of their online features in an Application. Harvey Norman is in the process of developing an application that allows the customer to select a particular product such as kitchen-ware, furniture and other appliances but does provide all of their online features in the application itself.

There are also a few interior decorating applications but these do not offer the inbuilt purchasing capability that IKEA does. The IKEA Virtual Furniture Application is a one stop shop for any consumer looking to purchase furniture. Value Curve The value curve helps to understand what features a customer see will add value to their experience; in this case the curve compares in-store purchases, online purchases and the IKEA Virtual Fu