For the maker looking to turn their project into a business, trying to price your widget can be a bit of a conundrum. You want to share your widget with the world without going broke in the process. What if you could achieve both, letting the end user finish assembly? [PDF]
While over a decade has passed since Harvard Business School released this study on what they dub “The IKEA Effect,” we suspect that most of it will still be relevant given the slow pace of human behavior change. In short, when you make someone become part of the process of manufacturing or assembling their stuff, it makes them value it more highly than if it was already all put together in the box.
Interestingly, the researchers found “that consumers believe that their self-made products rival those of experts,” and that this is true regardless of whether these people consider themselves to be DIY enthusiasts or not. This only holds if the person is successful though, so it’s critical to have good instructions. If you have a mass market item in the works, you probably don’t want to require someone with no experience to solder something, but as IKEA has shown, nearly anybody can handle some hex screws and Allen wrenches.
If you’re looking for more advice on how to get your invention in people’s hands, how about this Supercon talk by Carrie Sundra about manufacturing on a shoestring budget or this video from Simone Giertz on her experiences with manufacturing from idea to finished product. You might want to steer clear of people promising patents for pennies on commercials, though.
This same phenomenon is why Betty Crocker cake mix require cracking in an egg. Originally the mix contained powdered egg protein and didn’t require adding an actual raw egg, but focus groups found people believed the outcome to be better and felt like they actually made the cake, if they had to crack an egg.
The cake mix story is a myth. It became a myth when marketing companies started using it as an example of the effectiveness of marketing, essentially marketing marketing.
https://cantrell.medium.com/the-myth-of-the-instant-cake-mix-a45aaac8b302
You see, the primary customer of a marketing agency is not the consumer they’re selling the products to, but the business. That means the marketing itself doesn’t need to be effective so long as the business that bought it believes it was, which is a matter of… marketing.
Unfortunately that website is not the original article I remembered, but an AI generated copy.
This was the original:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/something-eggstra/
“”while Dichter’s work was influential, its precise role in the success of the cake mix is unclear.” For starters, although it may not have been a point articulated by the homemakers Dichter surveyed, the fact was that fresh eggs produced superior cakes. Using complete mixes which included dried eggs resulted in cakes that stuck to the pan, had poor texture, had a shorter shelf life, and often tasted too strongly of eggs.”
Besides, one of the co-authors of the IKEA effect paper was later caught fabricating data for behavioral science research. With the replication crisis still going on, it’s just as well the IKEA effect too is bunk science.
Turns out it does replicate:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/310491448_The_IKEA_Effect_A_Conceptual_Replication
But this paper reveals a different reason for the effect: psychological ownership.
“Our results show that the IKEA effect also prevails when companies integrate their customers
into the value creation process by giving them control and decision power
over the product portfolio.”
That is, the IKEA effect doesn’t come so much from the manual effort you spend on assembling the product, but from the feeling of control over it. Here you have the traditional self-positivity bias where people judge their own choices and decisions to be good by default to avoid cognitive dissonance, which translates to valuing something higher if you had anything to do with its existence – be it simply choosing a custom color or deciding whether the drawer is on the left or the right side of the table. That makes it special, which makes it better, because you made it so.
Can confirm! Just assembled a second monitor on a movable arm yesterday. Assembled the arm myself, instructions were clear enough.
Now I don’t have to alt-tab again and again just to switch between schematics and layout.
The person in the image is wondering where all their money went, after opening an empty box, right?
Wondering what the ikea support might have told them to make them smile after that??
It illustrates the critical part often forgotten by makers that want to sell their widgets: even if documentation and assembly instructions are perfect, kits must be backed up by great customer support.
Also, don’t fall into the trap implied by the first paragraph: selling your widget as kit instead of finished product may cost you more when accounting for all the time spent on documentation, kitting, and support.
The idea of empowering someone by making it easy for them to “make” something by assembling prepared parts is not new.
A century ago, boxed cake mixes came on the scene, allowing someone with little practice or experience to make “home made” cakes.
But the real genius came about post-war, when manufacturers omitted the dried egg, and asked the homemaker to provide that ingredient themselves. That changed it from “add water, mix, bake” to “mix ingredients that you assembled, blend with some skill, and bake. It made the baker more invested in the process and made “better tasting” cake.
That subtle change of one ingredient changed the game: the cake-maker was proud of the product, shared it with friends, and sales took off.
I was going to mention this myself. There is some irony in the fact that the powdered egg going into the mix at the factory was probably better calibrated to the mix and may have more predictably made the cake than an egg pulled from the fridge. But the perception matters a lot in this case.
Trowing in some extra eggs usually makes cakes taste better. And so do spices, cocoa, raisins, nuts and a lot of other ingredients. In times long gone I sometimes baked my cakes “extra tough”. Not the soft sweet spongy things, but more bread like. They were tough enough to survive a day or two in a rucksack and tasty enough that you did not have to put any other fillings on it.
It was the opposite case, and still is. Dried egg powder does not make good cakes.
Last time I tried to buy something at ikea, during checkout the (automated) register started asking all kind of stupid questions. Then I understood why the other people before me took so long to get through the payment system I had to wait so long, even though the queue was fairly short. My patience ran out and I just walked away without payment nor my things.
You had a perfect opportunity to spit on self-checkout and you walked out like a total cuck. Shame on you!
surprisingly, i don’t agree with the premise of this article, and i don’t know if that just means i’m an odd duck.
i’m thinking about all of the furniture i’ve assembled.
first, the good: i’ve had a couple sets of the cheapest sheet-metal shelves, and i value those because they are so configurable. i’ll have shelves close together and shelves far apart and random doodads hanging off of all of the unused holes. and there’s lots of cases of furniture that i loved because i modified in it some way. like i used to have an upholstered arm chair that i had built a little table into one of the arms for my coffee and trackball.
but then, the rest: i’ve assembled a bit of ikea furniture, and a lot of the k-mart / martha stewart branded stuff of the same quality. and i don’t think there’s a single exception to the rule that assembling it myself exposed me to how incredibly cheap the materials were. i valued it less because the act of assembling forced me to confront its particle board nature. anchors in particle board! i’ve parted with every single one of those. some of them survived one move but i don’t think any of them survived 2 moves. some of them even went in the trash, no second owner.
ikea furniture is furniture for apartments. when your lease ends after a year or two, you don’t cry so much if you decide to throw it away. it’s just good enough that if you stay in one apartment for 5 years, you don’t necessarily have to replace it in all that time.
i have a grand old diningroom table that looks like it came from the 1950s. i got it off the curb when some college kids moved out. it had been refinished and then painted black and then painted again in beer pong green. and i stripped all of that off and polyurethaned it. that makes me appreciate it more, not because of my own labor, but because i’ve proven it’s indefinitely maintainable. probably my kids will have to cart it out of here when i’m dead.
a weird case is a coffee table i had, from salvation army thrift shop. i had to throw it out because my toddler was eating it, because it was just particle board. but because i didn’t have to assemble it or anything, the fact that it was particle board never bothered me until lil chompy chomps started chomping on it.
Cheap board – reminds me of a wardrobe I had to assemble. That wardrobe SUCKS and I hate it with a passion.
Three of us sweated for 4 hours, and it still came out tilted. The paper-thin backing board couldn’t hold it in shape, when we moved it from flat to up against a wall.
Give me sturdy stuff, and I’ll pay someone to carry it for me.
Quality flatpack is rarely as good as proper carpentry, but it can still be really really darn good stuff. Quite a bit of the furniture I’ve got started as Ikea parts at least – just pick the more solid end of their stuff and its a good cheap premade bit of furniture, that comes apart easily if you need to move it.
While even the best IKEA offer is still cheap wood, held together by dowel and cam locks rather than great joints and hardwood it is still largely solid pine etc. Now the stuff that is mostly cardboard with a veneer of something isn’t great, certainly doesn’t lend itself to customisation or repair, but still good enough to last quite a while for those times you need something.
So I’d suggest you are not overly odd, but you viewpoint is more a product of the quality level of the kit furniture you have interacted with being the really bottom end stuff, mixed with your comprehension of what a quality material for the job would be like. As if you thought all furniture was Cardboard and MDF with a “pretty” skin you’d not know any better, but because you do…
yeah i agree my negative view is based on meeting the low-end of assembled furniture. but my point is, assembling it made me hate it. i had a pre-assembled piece of furniture of essentially the same low quality that i liked better because i hadn’t had my nose rubbed in the quality
Indeed, but if you had been assembling a good one you’d probably appreciate the quality of design and materials more and thus care about it more not less as is the article premise.
That’s the thing – there are no good ones. If it was made out of real solid wood with proper joinery, you’d need the carpenter to put it together properly. Flat-pack furniture is made to assemble “loosely” so it actually goes together easily, and that results in furniture that tends to be a bit wonky and feels cheap even in the best cases.
Combine with being covered in obvious wood imitation vinyl all over, it just doesn’t compare to the real deal. But, you’re right: being exposed to the fact that it is just vinyl covered cardboard makes you treat it with more care – because you know it cannot be mended. One ding and it’s done. Buy another.
It’s furniture that’s designed to look good in a catalogue, which ironically is replaced by computer renderings these days to save the trouble of assembling the set.
For example, if you drop something on a wooden table top and it leaves a dent, you can usually put a wet cloth and a hot iron over it, and it’ll pop out. Then re-apply furniture wax and polish etc.
On an IKEA table, that’ll ruin the table top. That dent will be there forever.
The loose and wobbly kind has always seemed to be what ikea tried to avoid with their flat pack – it saves them more money if their joints are good so that they don’t have to build them to be able to support the rated load on one good joint and three loose ones, for example. However you can still wreck the joints by hamfisted assembly, disassembly, rougher usage than designed, etc. Just like stripping a bolt can turn a tight, strong metal frame into a wobbly mess, crushing, snapping, or omitting a dowel could do the same. And then once it’s wobbly if you keep using it all the other joints wear out very quickly afterwards.
In general, ikea furniture is not overbuilt enough to be mistreated. However unlike most cheap furniture, the dimensions are generally pretty accurate and the tolerances are reasonable. As long as you don’t crush the dowels or fail to set a reasonable tightness on the hex fasteners or whatever, then you can disassemble it and reassemble it without it becoming loose and rattley. Sometimes also, the answer is to not tighten things all the way until everything is in place, and then alternate fasteners just like you do on anything else where tolerances matter, like things with gaskets.
But if you jam a dowel in when it doesn’t want to go, maybe it takes the load successfully the first time. But now it’s crushed and if you ever take the pin out again the dimensions are wrong and it’s not going to take the load it’s supposed to take next time. Or if you leave an a bolt loose, then as you use the furniture it will flex and the hole will wallow out and again, now the furniture won’t remain stiff. Or, if you tighten it too much so it bends, then not only is it bent now but next time if you don’t tighten it just as much or more, you don’t get the benefit of the fastener. Oh, and if you let things get bent (metal) or wet (particle board) while you’re moving house, then they may not be the same afterwards.
On one of the pages of an Ikea instruction set I doodled two cartoon ikea characters yelling at each other then on the next page the same two plus a divorce lawyer.
.
I’m not a huge fan of ikea for many reasons. I’m with the person above- it’s really crap materials but still prices like 80% of what better furniture would be. Unfortunately even “better” furniture eg pottery barn is still mostly MDF and engineered “wood”
As I get older and grumpier I’m more and more designing and building my own stuff. Not only is it better but I invest the money saved into nice tools too. Examples of that a pin nailer is a game changer and a very nice quality airless sprayer. Frankly a $2 2×4 prepped and painted is so much nicer, stronger and obv cheaper than pretty much any store bought furniture.
I assume this “IKEA effect” is much less pronounced in people who regularly make things, either as their profession or hobby. It’s hard to imagine a cabinet maker or even a model builder taking much pride in assembling some crappy VITTSJÖ or KALLAX shelves.
The “IKEA effect” doesn’t apply solely to IKEA furniture, y’know.
For one example, see the “Notaklön” guitar effects pedal kit from JHS Pedals. If it had been released as a normal finished pedal, or a normal component kit, no-one would have paid it any attention, but making it a minimal-assembly-required kit that anyone could build (basically putting a couple of prefab boards into a case) made it a phenomenon. They even deliberately copied the Ikea look & feel.
I have a side business that uses this technique. Though, it is to allow people to save money. My products are PCBs that have all the surface mount components installed and a bag of through hole parts to install. Have shipped several thousand boards and have had nothing but rave reviews and just 2 returns. It’s a niche product and I’ll never get rich doing it but it has paid for a lab and shop full of equipment.
This is essentially 2/3 of Tindie.
with the benefit of, atleast maybe for while, avoid the cost of type approvals, EMC testing, etc. ?
but why people don’t like the software’s that requires assembly and setup?
I do.
Ive used a ton of cad software of the last 30 years.
My favorite is Rhino primarily because theres so much flexibility in setup and there are so many 3rd party plugins that you can apply to fine tune its capabilities for your particular use case.
one of the takeaways of the study was that unsuccessful/incomplete assembly causes reduced evaluation. I think the issue is the frustration barrier is too high for many users. This study also forces the user to assemble something, then measures value afterwards. They skip the anxiety of not knowing how to start. I think (and I’m just guessing) that if a user has some prerequisite skills like “knows how to navigate their OS and install software” then they’re more likely to start an easy task like “install this program using .msi installer, then edit a text file”.
oh You folks are missing the best part of flatpack furniture.
Getting called over to help that neighbor
,that you like, assemble it while you play “hold this piece” Twister.
“wink wink, nudge nudge”
oh You folks are missing the best part of flatpack furniture.
Getting called over to help that neighbor
,that you like, assemble it while you play “hold this piece” Twister.
“wink wink, nudge nudge”
And ad one more reason that I don’t get along with touch screens. The un-intended multi-“clicks” from simply having my fingers anywhere near the #%*%ing device
I think, back in the day, Heathkit sold electronic product kits for more than the product could be purchased retail. They had a huge following and even now, long after they have been pronounced dead, their unassembled kits (and some assembled) sell for a high price. Radio Shack tapped into that market (I was a big customer) but never had the same reputation for ending up with a true quality product.