IKEA Makes Corporate Travel Training Memorable with Custom Animation
IKEA turned its most recognizable tool into an animated character to teach employees something no one wants to sit through: how to book corporate travel
"Animated training videos are powerful marketing tools, and they're playing an increasingly significant role in corporate training as well these days. We're thrilled about our partnership with IKEA." — Daniel Bales, Founder & Executive Producer, Sharp Eye Animation
About IKEA
IKEA is the world's largest furniture retailer. This project was produced for Ingka Group, which operates the majority of IKEA retail locations worldwide.
Problem
IKEA needed to teach corporate employees how to book business travel — the kind of internal process training that is mandatory, necessary, and almost impossible to make anyone care about. Policy documents and slide decks get skimmed and forgotten, and a process nobody absorbs is a process people get wrong.
IKEA wanted employees to actually retain it, which meant the training had to be genuinely watchable.
Solution
Sharp Eye Animation built the training around a character: Allen the Allenwrench, an animated version of the hex key that comes in every IKEA box.
The choice solved the attention problem directly. It made an administrative topic entertaining enough to hold employees to the end, and anchored the training in an object every IKEA employee recognizes instantly. Rather than a narrator reading procedure aloud, employees followed a familiar character through the process.
The finished video runs 1:58 in a clean vector style, produced start to finish in three weeks. A live-action production could not have delivered it: the character is the concept, and the character only exists in animation.
See the project specs and full video.
Results
"Allen the Allenwrench" was named a Gold Winner in the Digital Media — Web Training Video category at the 2021 MarCom Awards, an international creative competition run by the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals.
Gold Winners represent the top 24% of a field of more than 6,000 entries from marketing and communication teams worldwide, ranging from individual communicators to media conglomerates and Fortune 500 companies.
For a two-minute video about booking travel, that is the clearest possible evidence of the underlying idea: no corporate training topic is too dry to be made memorable.
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