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[IKEA Effect] The Process of Baking a Cake Is the Tasty Part
“Dangerous Marketing Lessons from a University of Tokyo Professor” (Makoto Abe / KADOKAWA)
In a nutshell
- Merry Christmas! How’s your holiday going? Have you had cake yet?
- A cake mix that required nothing but water didn’t sell, but one that asked you to add eggs and milk afterward did.
- Assembling IKEA furniture makes you grow attached to it, which makes you value IKEA products more highly.
Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas, everyone. I hope you’re having a wonderful day.
As for me, I’m probably doing what I always do—writing a blog post.
By the way, have you had cake? These days most of us just pick one up at the bakery on the way home.
Even if you make it yourself, cake mixes are everywhere now, pre-formulated to rise nicely in the oven. There are ready-made pots of sukiyaki broth, and homemade Valentine’s chocolate usually just means melting store-bought bars.
Still, both cakes and chocolates are delightful precisely because of the effort it takes to make them—or the effort someone put in for you.
Whatever you do, don’t say, “This tastes like 100% store-bought Ghana chocolate.”
When Cake Mix Stopped Selling
At one point, cake mixes stopped selling.
In 1950, Betty Crocker in the United States created a revolutionary cake mix. All you had to do was add water and bake. By incorporating powdered eggs and milk, they made it so you could bake a cake with virtually no effort.
They thought it would fly off the shelves, but sales actually dropped compared with the old mixes. Why would a more convenient product sell worse?
When they asked homemakers, the answer was that it felt so easy that others would think they were cutting corners.
Taking that feedback, Betty Crocker stripped the powdered eggs and milk out of the mix and relaunched it so that cooks would add fresh eggs and milk themselves.
That extra effort injected a sense of homemade pride, and the product regained its popularity.
You can see the same pattern with meal and model kits, partwork collections like those from DeAgostini, and even planning a trip (which is often more fun than going). Effort sweetens the experience.
The IKEA Effect
Dan Ariely and his colleagues coined the term “IKEA effect” to describe this phenomenon in their papers.
IKEA famously has you assemble its furniture yourself. The bookcase below is a typical example. Trivia: IKEA screws use standards that are a little awkward with Japanese screwdrivers—but that’s a story for another day.
As you piece IKEA furniture together, you start feeling attached to it. That positive feeling extends to IKEA itself, so when you buy your next piece of furniture, you end up reaching for IKEA again.
Of course, IKEA furniture is mass-produced at low cost; it’s not made from particularly premium wood. Yet when people try to sell their own pieces secondhand, they tend to price IKEA items relatively high.
The “make them put in effort so they’ll be happy” approach is everywhere. Raise a Pokémon and you’ll grow attached. The same goes for the cake or the homemade Valentine’s chocolate we talked about. Buying it might lead to something tastier, but the process is what makes it special.
References
If I had to recommend one marketing book first, it would be “Dangerous Marketing Lessons from a University of Tokyo Professor” (Makoto Abe / KADOKAWA), which I mentioned earlier.
I first brought it up in another post about Arashi’s concert ticket pricing—“Transaction Utility Theory: Why Arashi Tickets Aren’t 100,000 Yen but Around 10,000”. I feel like it covers every major marketing theory currently in play.
It deserves to be better known—like Hitotsubashi University professor Ken Kusunoki’s bestseller “Competition Strategy as Story”.