Even the book sometimes credited as the source of the Dichter anecdote, Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America, by Laura Shapiro, says that "if adding eggs persuaded some women to overcome their aversion to cake mixes, it was at least partly because fresh eggs made for better cakes".
Nonetheless it is the story of Dichter making a profound psychological insight into consumer behaviour that has passed into legend.
Almost seven decades later, the idea of making things more laborious to get consumers to value them more is an established marketing tactic.
We now know it as the "IKEA effect".
Testing the IKEA effect
The IKEA effect — "that labour alone can be sufficient to induce greater liking for the fruits of one's labour" — was named in a 2011 paper in the Journal of Consumer Psychology by Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely. They chose the name because products from the Swedish manufacturer typically require some assembly.
Their paper also begins with the cake-mix story. It concedes there might have been other reasons General Mills increased its sales — an alternate view is that the icing on the cake was, in fact, the icing on the cake — but the authors were enthused by the idea that "infusing the task with labour" was a crucial ingredient.
To empirically confirm this phenomenon, and its limits, they conducted experiments that involved assembling IKEA boxes, folding origami and building with Lego.
The results showed participants valued items they assembled themselves more than items assembled by someone else.
In one of the experiments participants were asked to fold origami cranes or frogs and then bid to buy the creations.
The bidding phase also included origami made by expert folders. They tended to see their own creations as much more valuable than those made by other participants, and almost equal in value to the expert origami.
The experiments also showed the effect had limits.
When participants spent too much time building or deconstructing their creations, or failed to complete the task, their willingness to pay for the item declined.
In another experiment some participants built an IKEA box, while others were allowed to complete only half the steps required to build the box.
Those who got to complete their box valued it much more, shown by their willingness to pay to keep it.
Related, but different
The IKEA effect is connected to, but not quite the same as, a number of other important economic behaviours.
First, there is the endowment effect, in which simply owning a product increases its perceived value.
It was formally named by economist Richard Thaler in a 1980 paper. Since then many studies have demonstrated that individuals usually want more to give up something they own than they are willing to pay to acquire a similar item from someone else.
Second is the psychological idea of effort justification. This goes back to studies in the 1950s. The idea is that an individual who makes a sacrifice to achieve a goal rationalises the effort by attributing greater value to the achievement. In one study, for example, women made to undergo an embarrassing initiative to join a social group subsequently rated membership of that group higher than those who did not.
Third is personal preference, which is expressed by consumers being attached to particular brands. Being involved in the creative process might be regarded as an extension of this attachment to individual tastes, something companies seek to leverage through customisation options.
In their experiments Norton, Mochon and Ariely were very careful to control for these effects. None of the items they had participants assemble entailed customisation.
Their findings have been supported by subsequent studies that disentangle ownership and personal preference from valuing the fruits of one's labour.
Balance important
Having customers do most of the work, feel great about it, and feel they have attained "greater value for money" is the Holy Grail for marketers.
Food and grocery brands are using the IKEA effect to attract new "value-seeking" customers. Consider the "ready-to-create" meal kit of pre-packaged raw ingredients you prepare and cook. These meals seek to balance the desire for convenience with concerns about healthy eating and the pleasure of cooking.
• Gary Mortimer, Associate Professor in Marketing and Consumer Behaviour, Queensland University of Technology; Frank Mathmann, Lecturer (Assistant Professor), Queensland University of Technology, and Louise Grimmer, Lecturer in Retail Marketing, Tasmanian School of Business and Economics, University of Tasmania
- This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
