As you may have guessed by now, my goal in writing these newsletters is to help you go to bed smarter than when you woke up by altering facts of what other people have already figured out.
In other words, all my knowledge and wisdom; a borderless nation state.
And one of these is The IKEA Effect.
You know. IKEA. The Swedish company that sells pieces of cheaply constructed furniture components, along with wordless cartoon instructions, packaged with a bag of hardware including several wrong pieces, and almost always missing one critical component.
The IKEA Effect was identified and named in a 2011 paper in the Journal of Consumer Psychology by Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely. They described the IKEA Effect as a psychological phenomenon that explains how we come to love and value the things we put in effort into.
Thus the more effort we put into it, the more we are invested in it, the more we value it. It’s a feeling that what we have made is a hundred times better than any professional could have done. In fact, it’s the best made piece in the history of the world.
| But what is more interesting, is that we think others should value it as much as we do, often widely out of proportion to their logical value. Take selling a home. I see this all the time. Someone who has worked on their home or home projects are often inclined to feel that the house is worth more than market value because of their labors of love. Because really, how can anyone not credit the time and effort it took to painstaking glue the crumbling ’70‘s wallpaper in the bathroom, to embroider daisies on the pink ruffled kitchen curtains, to build a coffee table out of recycled beer bottles, to needlepoint Canada geese flying east on the toss cushions, and to scrounge wood for scaffolding in order to hang the 6 foot macramé wall hanging? Like Chihuahuas and hot curries, this emotion often provokes extreme reactions. So the moment people are involved with their built environment, they have a totally different relationship to it. The equation: the higher the contribution, the higher the value. Interior designers know this feeling. And most of us also have a really great hair. By the way, is it possible to ever get attached to a BILLY bookcase? |
IKEA also discovered a long time ago, 1943 to be exact, that people are sometimes willing to pay more for things they are involved in building, hence the 957 million customer visits yearly to IKEA stores.
Interestingly enough, it actually is more about the completion of the task, as the effect completely disappears when the task is not completed well or not completed at all.
Who of us does not have, somewhere in our home, a table, dresser or bookcase far past its expiration date – wobbly, chipped paint, missing a handle, but we just can’t quite bring ourself to throw it away.
Why?
We BUILT the thing. Maybe it was 27 years ago, but darnit, it’s our baby.
All of us feel successful, and maybe even faintly triumphant, by turning a pile of wood with pre-drilled holes into a desk. The secret that IKEA hit on 77 years ago, is to find the sweet spot; where we can enjoy “building” a desk, get a bit frustrated, but still feel in control and use at the end. It’s always a cause for celebration, even if there is a couple of screws left over or a leg on backwards.
“So what?”, we say. We silently curse the IKEA Gods and go find some duct tape.
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