Branding Conference 06 hosted Igor Stefanac, Director of corporate communications for South Eastern Europe in the company IKEA, who explained why popular furniture producer is still not coming to BiH.
“We can see that we have a lot of customers and visitors from BiH and we are very glad for that. Currently, IKEA Croatia belongs to a regional organization of IKEA Southeast Europe and there are also Slovenia, Serbia and Romania. It is difficult to predict whether we will expand to other countries of the former Yugoslavia, since there is no decision regarding to BiH and retail at the moment,” said Stefanac.
He emphasized the importance of cooperation of IKEA with domestic producers, which create products for IKEA through multimillion contracts and ultimately export all of these products.
“Thus, IKEA improves export of BiH”, explained Stefanac, who made a parallel with the situation when there was no IKEA in Croatia.
“The initiative for IKEA in Croatia started in 2006, because people had to go in Graz before that. People were asking why IKEA, which was supposed to be opened in 1991, did not come to Croatia.
First, we had to figure some things, primarily the economy, because IKEA does not want to come to the country in which its products will be considered as expensive. When wrongly perceived, as department store that sells expensive things, it is very difficult to correct it later,” explained Stefanac.
When it comes to marketing tools, which was mostly discussed in Sarajevo, Stefanac emphasized that the world has become a global village and what is currently trend in Europe, of course, becomes accessible in our region very quickly.
“I think we are not lagging behind much, we quickly implement new things and our customers rapidly adopt new technology trends. We are turning to the digital age, however, television is still “main thing” for us. Although this is not bad, compared to Europe, we watch TV more than average and it requires additional money for marketing,” said Stefanac.
“Everyone who understands the market has to take certain laws into account. Croatian and BH market, although quite similar, have some finesse that we should pay attention to,” concluded Stefanac.
(Source: I. P./Klix.ba)
