A world where everyone feels at home.

We’re passionate about ensuring that our co-workers and customers can be themselves 100% of the time, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. Whilst as a society we’ve come a long way, we recognise that progress is difficult and requires work, guts and imagination – and there’s still work to be done.  

The latter, along with the beautiful video above, is what was recently released on social platforms by Ikea in celebration of this year’s International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia (IDAHOBIT) which happens on the 17th of May. In the last years, Ikea has taken several actions to celebrate the LGBT+ community and, this year particularly, they are surprising us with an entire campaign dedicated to push progress and awareness further, namely the “Progress is Made” campaign.

So what progress was made so far by Ikea?

According to their website IKEA Australia created gender-neutral bathroom spaces to help co-workers and customers feel safe, comfortable and accepted in their stores. In Serbia, IKEA showed support of pending legislation that recognizes same sex unions. In the United States, IKEA received a perfect score from Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s index of LGBT+ friendly workplaces. These are just a few actions the company has taken so far to spread equality, diversity and inclusion.

At MadeFor, we deeply care about helping you achieve customer centricity and hence developed 8 Customer Way principles. In Principle 4 - “Focus on the end-to-end” - we talk about how important it is for companies to manage customer campaigns for end-to-end journeys. This needs to be considered at campaign, audience and internal levels. At the campaign level, CX teams should take into account how every step of the journey can be affected by a single campaign. At the audience level, customer CX teams need to understand how a single campaign can impact the journeys of several target audiences. Finally, at the internal level, firms should structure the business in a way that reflects brand purpose and campaign activities.  

IKEA has clearly showed how considering all these 3 aspects simultaneously is fundamental to launch a successful and impactful campaign. In fact, what stuck with me the most is that the Progress is Made campaign is not only focused on communicating what they stand for to the outside world only, but that they've been transparent and open externally, about sharing and embracing their position at the internal level as well. For instance, IKEA is helping its employees understand how they can become stronger allies to the LGBT+ community by encouraging them to update email signatures and LinkedIn profiles with their individual pronouns (such as she/her/, he/his, and they/theirs) as a demonstration of inclusion to the LGBT+ community. In my opinion, both as a consumer and professional, IKEA acting to be united on all fronts toward a common goal is a company I want take inspiration from.

Lastly but definitely not leastly, at MadeFor we celebrate and cherish diversity every day and the whole team wishes you a happy IDAHOBIT!

By Rosa.