Internal Campaign Transcreation for IKEA
Transcreating a playful internal campaign kit without flattening the brand voice that makes IKEA sound like IKEA.
IKEA launched Home Solar with an internal ambassador campaign built on sunshine puns and brand personality. Brightlines transcreated the full physical campaign kit into Dutch, French, German, Italian and Polish, adapting wordplay and tone for each market while delivering publication-ready artwork.
The challenge
IKEA needed to roll out its Home Solar programme to store ambassadors across five European markets. The English campaign kit was a physical box of branded assets: a booklet, postcards, an A2 poster, a tote bag, badges and stickers, all built around a "Box of Sunshine" concept. The copy was pure IKEA: warm, punning, self-aware. Headlines like "Hello Sunshine" and "Just Call Me 'Sun'." A fictional product listing ("SOL Sunshine, €0.00"). Every line leaned on wordplay that tied the solar energy proposition to IKEA's playful brand personality.
That personality is what made the project a transcreation challenge, not a translation one. Flatten the puns into literal equivalents and the campaign loses its energy. Lose the energy and co-workers in each market treat the kit as corporate noise rather than something they want to champion. IKEA's own tone of voice framework is explicit: the brand voice should never become corporate or bureaucratic, no matter how many languages it crosses.
Our approach
We started with IKEA's tone of voice guidelines, not the source copy. Understanding what the brand is supposed to feel like gave us licence to depart from literal translation where the wordplay demanded it. For some languages the sunshine metaphor transferred naturally. For others we rebuilt specific lines from scratch, finding local expressions that carried the same warmth and humour. The goal was always the same: a co-worker in any market should open the box and feel the campaign was written for them, not translated at them.
The kit also presented a production challenge. Thirteen separate assets, each with different format constraints: badge copy that had to fit a 28mm diameter, an A2 poster headline that needed visual impact at distance, a concertina booklet with a conversational storytelling flow across multiple panels. We handled transcreation and multilingual DTP as a single workflow, delivering publication-ready artwork for every asset in every language.
What we delivered
- Transcreation of 13 campaign assets into five languages
- Full "Box of Sunshine" kit: booklet, 6 postcard designs, A2 poster, tote bag, 3 badge sizes (28mm, 40mm, 58mm), sticker sheet, box lid and insert
- Adapted sunshine wordplay and brand personality for each market
- Multilingual DTP and artworking across all physical formats and dimensions
- Publication-ready files delivered to IKEA's production specifications
Navigating the complexity
IKEA's tone of voice framework is unusually specific for an internal document. Nine personality traits, each with explicit guidance on how the brand should and should not sound. The Home Solar campaign copy expressed all of them at once: playful in its puns, humble in its messaging, clear in its product explanation, optimistic in its outlook.
A version that was playful but not clear, or optimistic but not humble, would feel wrong to any co-worker who had spent time with the brand. That balance doesn't survive translation by instinct. We briefed each market team against the tone of voice document and reviewed every adaptation against it before sign-off.
The outcome
Every market received a complete, publication-ready campaign kit that maintained IKEA's brand personality without reading as a translation.
- Full ambassador kit transcreated and artworked into five languages
- IKEA's nine-point tone of voice framework maintained consistently across all markets
- All 13 assets delivered publication-ready, no additional DTP coordination required
- Sunshine wordplay adapted or rebuilt for each language, preserving the campaign's playful energy
How we can help
If your internal campaigns need to land with the same energy in every market, we can help you get there. We work from your brand guidelines, not just your source copy, so every version feels like it was written for that audience.
