IKEA Project: Students and sustainability

In the second semester at Leeds Beckett University, my teammates and I was working on a consultancy project for IKEA Leeds. We were tasked with researching the student's perception of sustainability as well as developing a comprehensive communications plan to effectively increase the awareness of IKEA’s brand image as an environmentally sustainable retailer among students in Leeds.

My teammates and I in the final IKEA presentation day

In order to complete it, we conducted both primary and secondary research. For primary research, there were 101 students in Leeds responded our online questionnaire, which helps us shape an accurate picture of student perceptions toward sustainability and their knowledge of IKEA's environmental practices. Besides, for the desk research, we did a detail comparative online communication analysis between IKEA and its competitors: Dunelm, DFS Furniture, Wilko and John Lewis in order to understand the best practices in sustainability communication within the retail home & furnishing market. In the end, a strategy and two campaigns with different tactics were developed to help IKEA Leeds reach its business environmental communication objectives.

What have I learnt from the project?

Research skill

I was mainly involved in doing primary research, designing the questionnaire and using SPSS to analyse our data from the survey. I have analysed many research data by this program, but every time I do it, I still learn something new.

(You can find the questionnaire here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RQ89SdLnoc8IKu4idKUeRdDf0WG6tvkt/view?usp=sharing)

Creative skill

In the most important parts - Recommendation on Communication Strategy and implementation tactics, my duty is visualising our ideas as well as designing the presentation to effectively deliver the result of the whole research.

Poster of one suggested campaign for IKEA Leeds.

International Skills

I was so glad that I have a chance to work with all smart and creative mates from different countries (the Netherlands, Jordan and Vietnam) with different backgrounds. I appreciate our differences, and I indeed learn from them a lot (thank guys!!) 

(from left to right) Gina, me, Vincent, Tracy and Rami

our lecturer: Robert Minton-Taylor

I am not good at expressing emotions and feelings directly to anyone, so through this post, I would like to thank our lecturer: professor Robert, who was enthusiastically supporting us all the time and have made an unforgettable wonderful semester!