In search of Europe: Sweden

  Sweden is such a delightful place, it seems desperately unfair

to focus on just one of its many gifts to the world.

But the question must be asked: has Ikea, the Swedish home furnishings-to-meatballs retail behemoth, done more to unify Europe than the European Parliament?

Perhaps that's the wrong way to phrase the question. Perhaps it should be: how does Ikea manage to unify Europeans around its brand and its products, where the parliament so often fails to do so?

The journey begins in a bedroom display unit on the first floor of an Ikea in Warrington, north-west England. It is situated aptly enough on Europa Boulevard and was the start of Britain's affair with the chain.

Perched on one of the beds are two Ikea "superfans", mother and daughter Annamaria and Nina Roberts.

Happy shoppers: These British Ikea fans feel empowered by the store

They liked the display rooms so much that they bought them in their entirety, beds, bookcases, bedspreads, the lot - one for Nina and a different one for her sister. They chatter enthusiastically about how much they like the way the store gives them ideas for how to do up their house.

I ask them about the European Parliament elections. Neither of them plans to vote.

"I have to say that the European Parliament is something that I have no great knowledge of," says Annamaria. "I know of its existence, but I don't think that they have an impact on me personally."

"Like my Mum," echoes Nina, "I don't know who my MEP is, and how it affects me I don't really know".

Round One to Ikea.

Ikea gets involved with all the sort of corporate social responsibility projects that every major company appears to do these days. But it is also engaged with on-the-ground projects, like organising car-sharing in France, that have an immediacy and an impact that the environmentally-minded European Parliament would die for.

After I'd seen the scheme in action in Rennes, in western France, I wandered into the store. With its display rooms on the first floor, its baskets of bright yellow bags and of course its plates of meatballs, it's pretty much a replica of the Warrington store.

That is no coincidence. Ikea has made its money - lots and lots of it - by ruthlessly standardising its products and the way it displays them.

How does that work, I asked Isabelle Cremoux, the spokeswoman for Ikea in France, when they are selling to such a wildly diverse European market?

"From store to store, we can sometimes adapt," she says, and anyway "everybody has a mix of things, coming from Ikea, coming from elsewhere, coming from their travels".

"People who have bought Ikea stuff, it does not look the same, because apartments are not the same. I have a lot of Ikea stuff, I don't feel I am living in an Ikea house."

This is not a point about interior design. Ikea manages to do something that the European Parliament gets it in the neck for. The chain sells uniform products across Europe. The parliament is often criticised for squeezing national identity by enforcing uniform standards across Europe. So how does the chain get away with it?

"In modern marketing," says Per Olof Berg, professor of brand marketing at the University of Stockholm, "we are talking about the interplay between the customers and the company. And sometimes customers pick companies for their own purposes. Customers are picking Ikea because it provides certain values."

Ikea's senior staff travel to Almhult, in southern Sweden, to have those values inculcated into them. It is as close to a company town as you get these days - there's an Ikea hotel, a private Ikea museum, and a host of Ikea laboratories, communications and personnel units. You are never far from a self-assembled bookcase or nice-looking but really very cheap mug.

Frugality and hard work are the guiding lights of the company springing, staff say, from the hardscrabble land around the town. Those values seep out into the way that customers interact with the company - appreciating the value for money, and participating in everything, from collecting and assembling goods.

So is the future shopping rather than voting? It's not that simple.

Former Swedish MEP Annelie Hulten, now a senior member of Gothenburg town council, on Sweden's west coast, acknowledges that the European Parliament has an image problem. Too remote from voters, she says, too difficult to communicate with. But she thinks that new opportunities may be opening up.

"I think the political parties have been too afraid of talking or discussing values. I think there is an opening now when we are talking [about the] environment, to connect shopping, environment, consuming, how we live.

"There are other things in life than just shopping."

Ikea and the European Parliament are, of course, chalk and cheese. In the end Ikea is just a shop - albeit a very big one - that has to do one thing: sell stuff to people, like beds and candles and jars of lingonberry jam. But Ikea pulls off some pretty neat tricks along the way - inspiring people who feel lost when it comes to their most important space, their home; involving people with their purchases, from catalogue to assembly.

Ikea gives people a degree of control, or at least the illusion of it. The parliament gives them a vote once every five years and then hands down laws. In amongst the bookcases, the tea lights and the table lamps, there may be lessons for legislatures everywhere.

  Source:  bbc.co.uk