Ketchum won accolades at this week’s PR Week Awards for its work promoting IKEA.  The firm smartly connected with the emotions of anyone who has snaked his or her way through the Swedish home furnishing giant’s megastores.  The gimmick: an Ikea staffer actually moved into the store and stayed there for five days, blogging the whole experience.

Another retailer with a cult-like following and non-conformist style is Trader Joe’s.  The California-based grocery chain has shunned advertising, relying instead on a campy newsprint circular filled with recipes and editorial content about its unusual array of products.  (Its organic skim milk doesn’t froth for cappuccino, but it’s a minor shortcoming.)

A music video about Trader Joe’s has been making the rounds on YouTube in recent weeks.  At a tad shorter than three minutes, the hugely amusing acoustic guitar and piano composition by San Francisco film maker Carl Willat was allegedly not authorized by Trader Joe’s.

Willat claims that he used his Palm Treo video phone to capture such bad-boy images as the hand-lettered Trader Joe’s sign prohibiting photography in the store,  personnel ejecting him from the premises, and sexy so-called “yoga moms” shopping for their organic fruit.  If this was, in fact, a corporate-sanctioned marketing exercise in viral video, it’s the best one I have ever seen.

“If I Made a Commercial for Trader Joe’s” has attracted 295,000+ views and 700 comments on YouTube.  If there’s a PR firm behind it, Carl isn’t spilling the beans just yet.  Maybe we’ll find out at the 2010 PR Week Awards.