Trying to Innovate? Be aware of the IKEA Effect
The Ikea Effect is a cognitive bias which sees us place a disproportionately high value on things which we have successfully created. It is one of many quirky biases or blind spots that permeate our thinking when we are trying to innovate. I’m am interested in this phenomenon and how and when we need to ‘use it’ — or ‘lose it’.
Who hasn’t had that moment of endearing DIY pride when through grit and determination — as well as the help of an Allen key and the odd expletive –we have successfully transformed a flatpack into the catalogue item we set out to buy?
This experience would probably be common to any Ikea customer since the brand opened its first retail store back in 1958…
Inadvertently, the brand also lent its name to a cognitive bias that many of us also know: 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.
When you look up the ‘Ikea Effect’, you will generally stumble upon the story of the unsuccessful launch of cake mixes as the trigger for research into this type of bias. This story dates back to the 1950s America:
What you learn is that when cake mixes were first launched by General Mills in supermarkets, they were a bit of a flop. Call it suspicion or maybe even shame, but to many housewives (yes, sorry, but that was absolutely the target audience), making cakes from a packet took away the sense of pride and satisfaction that they usually derived from baking a cake from scratch.
According to the ‘Dichter anecdote’ (so named after Ernest Dichter who ran focus groups for General Mills to solve the problem), what was interesting was that the addition of a simple ‘fresh’ egg made the difference.
Laura Shapiro, author of Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America, noted that: “The greater sense of effort gained from a little extra labour is believed to have been essential to the subsequent success of the cake mix.”
To empirically confirm this phenomenon, and its limits, Michael Norton, Daniel Mochin and Dan Ariely conducted four experiments in which they famously asked participants to fold origami cranes and frogs, assemble Ikea boxes, and build sets of Lego. They then asked the builders to bid for their creations and compared the prices of these bids with other evaluative measures from people who hadn’t built them.
According to their study:
▶ Builders consistently outbid the non-builders.
▶ Participants that were asked to assemble their own boxes bid higher than participants who were given pre-assembled boxes.
▶ Participants who had assembled their own boxes also rated their affection for the boxes higher than did non-assemblers.
▶ Non-builders in origami bid higher for origamis made by experts but lower for origamis assembled by the builders.
▶ Builders valued their own origami as highly as they did the expert figures.
The groups were asked to assemble and disassemble identical Ikea boxes. The first group was allowed to complete their assembly, while the second group was asked to stop midway, though was given all the necessary tools to assemble the boxes following the experiment. When asked to bid on the boxes, the first group bid on average three times higher for their boxes.
The trio also realised that being successful in their assembly was important: “When people had failed in their attempts to fold paper cranes and construct Lego sets, the Ikea effect weakened — as it also did when they were forced to dismantle their creations,” stated the study.
Interestingly, the Ikea Effect seems to work even when people have no opportunity to personalise their creations — as with the Ikea boxes and Lego sets.
While most participants’ origami skills left much to be desired, they loved their imperfectly personalised products all the more. Builders valued their crumpled crane-like creations nearly five times as much as non-builders.
Authors Mortimer, Mathmann and Grimmer highlight that the Ikea Effect goes beyond the simple notion of ownership: “The idea is that an individual who makes a sacrifice to achieve a goal rationalises the effort by attributing greater value to the achievement.”
Somehow, we think our personal efforts translate to increased value.
So how could this get in the way of creative thinking?
▶ It may limit our ability to adopt or appreciate ideas or processes to which we have not contributed. (‘Sound like that “Not Invented Here” bias to you?)
▶ It might be an incentive for people to double down on what they have invested in. (Which definitely reeks of the Sunk-cost fallacy — the phenomenon whereby a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they have invested heavily in it, even when it is clear that abandonment would be more beneficial).
▶ It may play out in stages like convergence where you vote for ideas you developed or ideas that support systems that you have had a hand in, it is likely to lead to a greater attachment to ideas your labour produced which suggests a greater resistance to ideas that challenge them.
▶ It may also skew projections when teams are attempting to evaluate the risk or potential gain of a specific idea…
So, can we use rather than lose this tendency to overvalue the things into which we have put a labour of love? If we really value our own work more than the works of others, what can we do to leverage this cognitive bias in our creative thinking and innovation efforts?
USING THE IKEA EFFECT
For innovation teams, here are some simple ways to harness this bias:
If people value ideas into which they have injected a labour of love, they will be more inclined to defend and implement them. This motivation could be harnessed by innovation managers to ensure that participants in idea generation workshops follow through with ideas that emerged in creative sessions and that business owners show more commitment to seeing the ideas they worked on come to life. One simple tip is to get clear ownership of each and every idea generated.
Engage people in ideas that you hope to see implemented. Find ways of getting them to improve on them so that they too have put effort into them and value them more. I work with customers to co-create ideas by running workshops on half- finished concepts where they can really apply themselves. To some extent, the rougher the prototype, the more people get involved and take ownership.
Consider using crowdfunding platforms. Your investors may be doubly committed to the product if they have helped to bring it to life.
Whatever your creative idea, find a way to have your customer ‘add an egg’.
Two known brands which have tried this in recent years are Toblerone and Coke. There is a pop-up stand in my nearest department store every Christmas that invites customers to personalise their Toblerone box with the name of a loved one. They appear to sell out well before Christmas Eve.
In 2011, Coca Cola Australia ran a ‘Share a Coke’ campaign which involved changing the traditional wrapping around the Coca-Cola bottle to say ‘Share a Coke with…’ and a name. In Australia, the top 150 most popular names were printed onto millions of bottles and the campaign was so well-received that other countries around the world adopted it with their own unique twists.
Another way of using this bias to your advantage is to offer products or services that allow the user to finish the task in some way. Today, in my local Australian supermarket, I can buy a range of mixes for meals such as tacos and green curries to which I add onion, meat and vegetables and many of the meal delivery kits are playing on this.
It’s important to note that if a user or a customer is involved in the building or assembly or customisation of a particular product but unsuccessfully completes the task, they will not value that product more. In fact, research shows that labour leads to love only when that labour is proven successful.
The lesson is to inject some labour and make the task slightly more challenging but make sure that the task is achievable. If you want your users or customers to value your product more, you have to set them up for success. Make it easy for them to contribute to a new idea or at least perceive that they can.
If you want your users or customers to value your product more, you have to set them up for success.
LOSING THE IKEA EFFECT
I noticed an interesting example of how you could ‘lose’ the Ikea Effect and dial up creativity on the Australian MasterChef TV show a few years back:
The contestants had been split into two teams and had been given the task of creating their own menu from scratch. They had designed their three-course meal and preparations were well underway when they were given a surprising twist: each team had to abandon their plans, switch teams and cook dishes they never intended to make. It took both teams a while to adjust and let go of what they had planned to do.
What I found interesting was how each new team brought their own creative twist to the menus of the opposing team. The output may well have been more interesting through the forced adaptation. It is impossible to tell: neither the judges nor the audience had the opportunity to taste what had initially been planned!
We sometimes apply this type of thinking in creative workshops and have teams move around to improve on the ideas of other teams. The aim is to bring diverse perspectives and identify any gaps but also to break away from too much ownership of the idea. This may neatly counter the Ikea Effect and promote more of a sense of ownership access to the pool of ideas.
Play around with this bias. Harness the passion and the ownership and also challenge the inevitable attachment. It can only help you innovate more effectively.
Rachel Audigé is a facilitator and trainer in Systematic Inventive Thinking. This is an extract from her book, UNBLINKERED The Quirky Bias that get in the way of creative thinking…and how to bust them.
