Buy With Your Time

Ikea’s campaign “Buy with your time” was a creative idea that was primarily inspired by the philosophical quote “time is money”. The main idea of this program was to treat the time taken to arrive at the store as currency to buy things. So, for example, if a customer took an hour to go to IKEA, and they showed evidence of that using the Google Maps Timeline data to prove the drive time. The cashiers would then convert the time taken to arrive into Dubai Dirhams as the campaign was based in IKEA Dubai’s new store Jed Ali.

“Buy with your time” officially started in February 2020, and was cut off in March 2020 due to COVID. However, it was a huge success, with 30% to 32% increased visits and $14 million in free earned media (social media coverage and global press). So, how did they do so well? What is the psychology behind this?

The whole reason IKEA started this campaign was due to the fact that it was in urban areas and extremely far away from the main, bustling city of Dubai. Therefore, it was a pain for many customers to drive all the way to the store. We can say that the target behaviour is that they wanted to encourage people to visit IKEA stores and make purchases using the time they spent travelling to the store as currency. To do this, they implemented quite a few concepts such as mental accounting, loss aversion and Anchoring bias

Mental accounting is when people subconsciously treat money differently based on who and where it came from, and they divide that money into different accounts depending on how they will use that money. For example, hard earned money feels precious to spend because you worked for it. But, birthday money feels easier to spend because you practically got it for free without sacrificing anything. This way, people put money into different categories based on who and where it came from. IKEA takes this idea and applies it cleverly, by treating travel time as money so that people categorise it into a separate account based on the time taken rather than how much money they would spend on it. For example, instead of thinking “this costs 60 dirhams”, the consumer will think “this cost me ___ amount of time”, creating a completely new mental account.

Anchoring bias is a behaviour that humans use by anchoring the first piece of information into their brain and relying on that information heavily to make decisions based on that. Normally, the price tag is the anchor. But, IKEA reframes this and makes a different anchor: time. Now, instead of anchoring themselves to the price tag, customers start thinking about the product in terms of the time taken.IKEA does not necessarily use anchoring bias to make the price seem more appealing or cheaper, but they do give a different perspective on how money can be perceived and how their campaign gives a new reference point to customers.

In my opinion, I think that this campaign is extremely smart and unique. It is something that has never been done before, and it has clearly done a good job of raising their sales. One change I would make, however, is to also include the amount of time spent in the store as a monetary discount on the items being purchased, alongside the travel time. However, this will only be applicable if you buy more than one thing as to avoid unnecessary loitering. This will encourage customers to visit the store more often and purchase more products.