IKEA & Instant Cake Mix: Why We Should Value Effort Over Convenience

How IKEA and instant cake mix demonstrate that convenience isn’t everything.

Photo by Oleg Laptev on Unsplash

There’s a widely known anecdote about General Mills, the large US food company, that goes something like this:

In 1950, supposedly, General Mills decided that its brand of instant cake mixes (Betty Crocker) was underperforming. In an attempt to boost sales, General Mills enlisted the help of the psychologist Ernest Dichter, an expert on consumer behaviour who became known as “the father of motivational research”.

Dichter, following intensive market research (perhaps unsurprising, given that he was named the Market Research Council’s Man of The Year in 1983), concluded that the cake mix recipe must be changed. He recommended that General Mills simply remove the powdered eggs from the mix and replace them with the instruction to add fresh eggs.

This simple piece of advice must have seemed wildly contradictory––undermining the primary objective of the instant cake mix. And yet, Dichter (if he really was the source of this curious advice) appears to have been right: creating a truly instant cake mix makes the process of baking too easy.

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Dichter argued that, by increasing a baker’s workload, General Mills would accord the baker with greater ownership and a greater sense of pride over the fruits of his/her labour. Over half a century later, it would seem that Ernest Dichter’s simplest of suggestions remains accurate.

If this story appears too good to be true then that’s probably because it is. Nevertheless, the basic principle––that the value of an individual’s labour and skill (as opposed to just the end result) matters––is also demonstrated by a more contemporary example.

A study published by the Journal of Consumer Psychology in 2011 found that simply assembling an IKEA box induced a greater liking of the participants’ work. This feeling of enhanced value also translated into a greater willingness to pay to keep the item (up to a certain point).

This effect could be attributed to a phenomenon known as ‘effort justification’. This is where an individual who sacrifices time and effort to achieve a goal attributes greater value to the achievement than if it had required very little effort.

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Effort justification is closely linked to the ‘endowment effect’, which asserts that simply owning an item can increase its perceived value. It’s conceivable, therefore, that simply taking the time to create a piece of IKEA furniture generates a personal attachment to the product which leads us to value it more highly.

Instant cake mix and IKEA furniture can teach both companies and individuals a valuable lesson about value itself — that, contrary to the advertising of industries such as fast food, convenience isn’t everything.

Reducing the workload involved in the production (by increasing the work that consumers need to put in) could simultaneously cut costs and boost sales. For individuals, effort justification (or the ‘IKEA effect’, as it has become known) should reinforce the basic tenet that the easy route isn’t always best. Next time you are given the choice between the quick and effortless approach, and the more involved, hands-on approach, remember that the second option could be far more rewarding.