Episode
How IKEA Rebuilt Brand Tracking for Growth
- Podcast
- Inside the Creator Economy
- Published
- May 27, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2182
- Processing state
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Summary
In this episode of Inside the Creator Economy, we sit down with Alexander Shmelkov, Director of Global Brand Tracking at IKEA. Most brand trackers are built to tell you what happened. Alexander has spent the last few years rebuilding one to help the business decide what to do next, across 64 markets, in an environment where the rules of growth are changing fast. In this conversation we get into why data on its own has no value, what it actually takes to turn insights into decisions, and how IKEA is transforming a 20-year-old measurement system into a genuine strategic tool. We also talk about what relevance really means for a global brand today, and why the bottleneck in most organisations isn't data, it's interpretation. We also explore: The shift from reporting to predicting: insights as a forward-looking function, not a rearview mirror Why the aha moment, not the data, is the real deliverable of insights work What it takes to run a global brand tracker across 64 markets without losing local relevance Insights as a people business: why human capability, not technology, is the real constraint