Transcription
The story starts in the kitchen back in the 1950s. Women weren't voting or they didn't really have bank accounts, but man, they were baking cakes. That year, Betty Crocker had come up with a genius new product called instant cake mix. All women had to do was take the cake mix, add water, and then bake it. Betty Crocker launched it to the market thinking they had cooked, but crickets. The instant cake mix was a flop. It didn't make sense. The cakes were delicious, convenient, quick. They should be smashing it. So, what was going on here? They hired a team of psychologists to investigate. And what they found was pretty weird. The housewives didn't want to use the instant cake mix because it was too easy. There wasn't enough work involved for them to get any emotional benefit from baking the cake. In fact, the lack of effort required from them made them feel like they were cheating. They relaunched the product with a slogan, add an egg. And all of a sudden, sales skyrocketed and instant cake mix was born. It turns out that the extra work of adding an egg gave people a sense of ownership over the final product. With one little crack, one big change took place. They went from feeling like they were cheating to feeling proud.
60 years later, a bunch of researchers wrote a paper called "When Labor Leads to Love." And finally, this phenomenon had a name, the IKEA Effect. Obviously, named after the Swedish furniture company, where you buy the items flatpacked and then take them home and argue with your partner about how to put them together. The IKEA effect is a psychological bias where people place higher value on things that they helped create. The researchers found that when we put effort into something, that thing stops being a thing and starts being part of us. Meaning, the more effort we put into something, the more emotionally invested we are in that thing. And when you're more emotionally invested in something, you're more loyal, protective, and obsessive about that thing. Take Crocs for example. Why are Crocs people like that? Well, it's partially because of the genius of jibbits. Just like adding an egg, jibbits give you the opportunity to invest effort. You find the exact right combination of jibbits to represent you, and suddenly your Crocs isn't just a shoe, it's an extension of you. It's the same with Build-a-Bear. Then there's Lego, Fortnite skins, Starbucks, where you don't just buy a drink, you build a drink. And Meta is obsessed with asking me to make everything my own. Once you see it, it's so transparent. These companies know that if they can get their customers to add an egg, we stop being just customers and we become co-creators, which they know makes us use, buy, and love their stuff more.
But how does this all lead back to the cultlike fandoms of Taylor Swift and Joe Rogan? The cult of Swift and Rogan. So, it's a lot more subtle, but Taylor Swift and Joe Rogan each use the IKEA effect in their own way on their audiences. And when this tactic is used by a person instead of a company, it's even more powerful because there's only so much emotional attachment you can have to like a pair of Crocs, but a person, that's where the IKEA effect gets supercharged. Taylor Swift hides Easter eggs in music videos and at live events and outfits. She drops cryptic hints about release dates and album meanings, and Swifties spend hours decoding them. This is the effort, and that effort breeds ownership. It leaves Swifties with the feeling that it's not just Taylor Swift's era, it's our era. It's not just a Taylor Swift show, it's a bracelet swapping ritual for all of us. Swifties don't feel like an audience. Because of the IKEA effect, they feel like co-creators of a world that they helped build. Joe Rogan uses it a little bit differently, but the outcome is the same. If you've ever listened to a Joe Rogan podcast, you know that his episodes are like 3 hours long. And after that much time, you stop feeling like a viewer or a listener, and you start feeling like a participant. You start to feel like a researcher. And when Rogan says to a guest, "A lot of people were asking for you." This tells the audience that you co-created this outcome. Now you're not just a fan of Joe Rogan. You're a fan of your version of Joe Rogan, the one that you helped build. Again, that's ownership, which leads to obsession. Now compare that to fan bases like Frank Ocean or Lorde or Sia. They still have loyal fans, but it's a relationship built on distance and mystique. It's reverence. It's pedestal. You admire them from afar, and that's totally fine if you want that. It's passionate, but it's not cultlike. When someone uses the IKEA effect, it becomes personal.
Okay. Okay. So, we know what it is, but how do you take the IKEA effect and turn it into a community that feels culty for you? Luckily, I broke it down into three simple steps for you. It's time to bake your cake. So, essentially, it comes down to this simple equation. Effort leads to co-creation. Co-creation leads to co-ownership. Co-ownership leads to cult-like obsession. So, here's how to do it. Step one, invite effort. Find small, creative ways to ask your audience to put in work. Ask them to vote on your next video topic or let them name something. Hide Easter eggs in your content. Build rituals that require participation. Inside jokes that carry over many videos, scavenger hunts, polls, merch design contests. But here's the thing, and this is very important. It can't feel like homework. People have to be able to do this thing easily and want to do it. It needs to be fun and surprising and rewarding. If you give them too much effort, they'll bounce. Give them just enough and they'll get hooked. Step two, co-creation. This is where a lot of people drop the ball, but you have to close the loop. If someone suggests something and you use that thing, name them, thank them, screenshot the comment, tell your community when they have helped co-create something. This is when the shift from just watching to "we made this" happens. Step three, signal co-ownership. They've put in effort, you've co-created with them. Now remind your audience that this is something that you're doing together. Give them tools to share it. Talk about their role in it. Cement the idea that this is a community brand. And if you can do that, it will lead to a cult-like obsession with your followers. Okay. Bye.