IKEA hands corporate PR brief to Kaper

Home furnishing retailer IKEA has selected Kaper as its retained UK corporate PR agency, following a competitive pitch.

The appointment will see Kaper work with IKEA’s in-house PR team to deliver corporate comms campaigns, building the IKEA corporate reputation and brand across England, Wales and Scotland from September 1 2016.

Kaper will work alongside IKEA’s retained consumer agency, Hope&Glory, which has handled consumer PR campaigns and events in England, Wales and Scotland for the past three years.

JPR continues to provide both consumer and corporate PR support in Northern Ireland.

Kaper’s appointment after IKEA started a review process of corporate agencies in May this year, with the support of Alex Young at the AAR Group.

The brief for the retained agency encompasses supporting all areas of the reactive and proactive corporate press office, including sharing corporate stories through business and consumer media on both a national and local store level.

It also includes delivering proactive comms campaigns created to activate diverse stakeholder groups in support of IKEA’s strategies and objectives.

MD Chris McCafferty and deputy MD Nicola Dodd will lead the Kaper team and report to IKEA’s country comms manager, Lewis Marshall, and corporate PR manager, Claire Morisot-Siebenthal.

Marshall said: “We are delighted to welcome Kaper to the team and look forward to working together on building the corporate reputation for IKEA in the UK. Although we are a successful business in the UK and our brand is relatively strong, our reputation today is based predominantly on our products and design-led elements.

“Bringing the Kaper team on board will help us to strengthen and protect the IKEA reputation by both sharing our positive contributions as a company and also by acknowledging our challenges and how we are overcoming them, building on our market leadership position and helping us to continue to grow our business.”

McCafferty added: “IKEA is a much-loved brand with a progressive and visionary ethos. From the first time we met them, we were inspired by the company’s value-driven culture and the team’s ambition to tell the stories of ingenuity behind the brand. We are hugely excited to be working with them to develop IKEA’s corporate strategy and reputation in the UK.”