Would you sleepover in store?

Ikea’s latest PR stunt ‘The Big Sleepover’, which offered fans the opportunity to stay in its Lakeside store for the night, has generated a lot of word-of-mouth.

The idea originated from clever monitoring of social media. The brand spotted a group set-up by avid Ikea fans on Facebook called ‘I Wanna Have a Sleepover in Ikea’ with over 100,000 members and saw the opportunity to link the customers’ request to their on-going ‘Happy to Bed’ campaign.

The event was a huge success from a marketing perspective. 100 guests attended the event including journalists and bloggers. The following day the blogzine went wild for Ikea: ‘we got sleep themed goodie bags, midnight snacks and were entertained by the reading of bedtime stories – Ikea is amazing!’ ‘It’s a dream come true…I heart Ikea’ etc. while a campaign for more stores to follow suit has begun.

So, if it works as a marketing initiative, can retail sleepovers work as a store-based service?

Parisian fashion boutique Paperdolls thinks so, so much so they’ve turned it into a new revenue stream. This week they are offering fashionistas the chance to stay the night at their Montmartre store – which has an appropriately domestic Parisian apartment aesthetic and layout – in order to beat the sales queues. For a fee of €200 (£165) visitors will get the chance to spend the whole night trying on all of the bargains, complete with on-hand stylist to offer fashion advice, whilst everyone else sets-up camp in the cold outside in the hope of bagging whatever’s left.

We’ll be sleeping in Apple stores pre-launch before you know it…