MIND GAMES
Why people who love the brand are kidding themselves
The impending arrival of Ikea has sparked a predictable media frenzy, driven by the enthusiasm of eager readers who can’t help but click on every article bearing the four-letter moniker of the Swedish company.
However, strip away the hype, cute references to meatballs, and endless stream of pop culture references, and this over-exuberant enthusiasm starts to look irrational — and that’s because it is.
But Ikea is nothing new in New Zealand. The company’s products are available on Trade Me and several stores operate as resellers of the products from the range.
This is best captured by Newmarket-based parallel importer Swedish Furniture, which has long advertised the Ikea logo on its storefront, inviting consumers to buy the products from the range.
There is every possibility the new Ikea stores will offer a few additional items, but this is hardly sufficient to spark such a media frenzy. Is all this hype really worth a chair or two?
The answer must be an emphatic “no, of course not”.
But it isn’t the Poa¨ ng chairs, the Kallax bookshelves or even the
Fa¨ rgrik mugs that captivate the passerby. It’s the promise of what Ikea represents.
This might sound nebulous, but it’s best explained through the work of Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who spent much of his career dismantling the idea of humans are supreme rational decision makers.
Through a series of experiments over several decades, Kahneman was able to show humans are often irrational, driven by personal bias and influenced by forces completely irrelevant to the matter at hand. In one of his more famous experiments, experienced German judges were inclined to give a shoplifter a longer sentence if they had just rolled a pair of dice loaded to give a high number. Other studies have also found the same food tastes better when you eat it with heavy cutlery and Coke tastes better in a glass bottle.
And this brings us back to Ikea. Another study, which showed people place a disproportionately high value on products they partially created, has been called the “Ikea Effect” largely because so many products sold by the company require assembly.
But this isn’t the only cognitive trick that goes into the making of this irresistibly powerful brand. The layout of the store has been designed to provoke the aspirational idea that your home could also look like that.
Ikea is a capitalist work of art. You too can have that minimalist sense of Scandinavian style as long as you buy more stuff.
This is part of the reason why Ikea has held such a strong grip on its Swedish roots despite the fact it has evolved into a multi-national behemoth, which outsources most of its manufacturing.
Clever branding always works this way. It pulls you in with an emotional story about a brand that makes your life better, and relies on your mind to convince you that you need that table, chair or mug. Whatever calculated decisionmaking that comes at this point has been influenced by forces far stronger than the roll of a dice or the weight of cutlery.
It’s a reminder we should not be so fast to judge those who queue overnight to get their hands on the latest iPhone. There’s a little bit of that madness in all of us. And it was put there by people who know what you want before you do.