A Cake Mix Failed Until It Was Made Harder to Bake
Mothers felt the just-add-water version deceived their families, but adding an egg made them feel they were really baking, and sales soared.
Think School · IKEA Business Case Study: How to Earn 40 Billion$ Every Year by Selling Furniture? (IKEA Effect)Picture an American kitchen in the 1950s. A mother empties a packet of powder into a bowl, stirs in only water, slides the pan into the oven, and a few hours later pulls out a perfect and delicious cake.
In those years, many American mothers baked cakes for their children as a way to show care for their families. The work was tedious and could stretch beyond a day.
The food company General Mills offered a shortcut. It packed all the ingredients into one instant cake mix, so a mother only had to add water and bake. The day long job could be finished in a fraction of the time, with reliably delicious results. Yet the easy mix failed miserably in stores, because ease was the problem. When baking took no work, mothers did not value it.
General Mills asked what could be wrong with such a convenient product and hired psychologists to find out. They reported that there was nothing wrong with the product itself. The problem was how it made mothers feel.
Mothers saw the mix as an insult to their work and felt they were deceiving their husbands and children by serving it.
Imagine your mother is known for her chole bature, her signature dish that takes all day to make, and you hand her an instant mix that needs only water. Would she accept it? Likely not, because the shortcut would take away what made her cooking feel personal and meaningful.
So General Mills added hurdles. The new mix asked mothers to crack open an egg and stir in extra ingredients, which added work and gave mothers the sense that they were putting in real effort to bake the cake.
Sales of the harder mix skyrocketed, and the once rejected product became a massive hit. The psychologists summed up the lesson in the line, "labor leads to love," meaning that when someone puts effort into making something, that person places extraordinary value on it.
That was the same idea IKEA later used for furniture, helping build a 40 billion dollar business. Back in that kitchen, a mother is cracking an egg into the batter and proud to call the cake her own.
Questions people ask
Why did adding an egg make such a difference?
It gave mothers a way to feel they had genuinely cooked. Cracking a perishable ingredient signaled real work and care, so serving the cake no longer felt like fooling their husbands and children. Psychologists call this effort justification, where the work we put in makes the result feel more valuable.
What is the IKEA effect?
It is the finding that people place extra value on things they help build, even if the result is imperfect. The name comes from IKEA, the Swedish furniture seller, because customers who assemble their own bookcases and tables at home often love them more than if they arrived ready made. Researchers at Harvard and elsewhere later tested the effect in lab experiments.
Do companies still use this idea today?
Yes, many businesses use versions of it. Meal kit services leave the final chopping and seasoning to you, build-a-bear shops have children stuff their own toys, and software often asks users to customize profiles and playlists. In each case, a little successful effort increases attachment, as long as the task is not so hard that people fail.