Egg Theory Explained - The IKEA Effect
If you hear the word IKEA, what would be the first thing you can think of? Most of us will remember the semi-assembled furniture from IKEA. The customers need to spend 30 minutes at home assembling those pieces up to a whole piece of furniture by themselves. For IKEA, those well packaged semi-assembled parts can save storage space which can lower the cost. However, one more important thing is that, when a customer is spending some time and effort to assemble a table, he will love it to a higher degree than other furniture. Of course, not everyone is a good assembler. The customer may spend hours in the assembly process. He may not understand the instructions and thus make mistakes or put wrong pieces. However, if they finally complete the whole work, the longer they spend on the assembly process, the more they will love it.
This is what IKEA Effect is talking about. This effect has another name, egg theory. It is from a story about cake mixes. If the cake mix has everything and the consumer just needs to put water and bake it in the oven, they won't take any credit from it. They don't think the final cake is really made by themselves. So, in the subsequent version of the product, the manufacturer gets rid of the egg and milk powder out of the mix and let people add those ingredients by themselves instead of just adding water. The result was pretty good and the sales were boosted in a short period, which made this cake mix a popular product suddenly.
Simply put, if the customer has a better chance to work on something, they will consider it as theirs and will love it more. This theory can actually be applied to any type of products, especially those products which can easily get customers to be involved such as cake shops. Nowadays, many cake shops have customer experience sessions which let customers bake a cake on their own. Customers will enjoy the whole process of baking a cake for themselves or someone they love. They can also take photos and share the images in their social media, which can be a good advertisement for the shop. Although the final price for those self made cakes will be higher, they will love it more than buying one from the shop directly.
Attribution:
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