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- [00:02]
Daniel
What is up, marketing besties? We are kicking off a brand new mini series called Go to Marketplace where we break down one go to market move in under 10 minutes. Real tactics, zero fluff, just the kind of stuff you actually use to launch smarter, grow faster and win your market. And joining me for this whole series is someone who lives and breathes Go to Market, Tamara Graminski. She's an award winning product marketer, former VP of product marketing at Kajabi, and one of the sharpest minds in the game. Let's get into it. And we are back with another Go to market play in 10 minutes or less. And today we're talking about one of the weirdest but most powerful human behaviors in marketing. People love things more when they build them themselves. And this is called the IKEA effect. And yes, it's literally named after the furniture store. And one thing about Ikea before we get into this episode, Tamara actually is on a IKEA desk right now. And we can get her a good boom stand because her IKEA desk won't have that, but she built it herself, so that's cool. And it made it feel good. So we're happy about that. But again, we're back with Tamara Graminski, founder, PMM Kim, and I'm guessing someone else. And also now that I found out, IKEA bookshelf as well. She's an IKEA girly all through and through. So welcome back to Harha.
- [01:35]
Tamara Graminski
Oh, yes, I have the desk. I have a bookshelf. And you are right, this desk may be causing complications for us right now. But I love this desk, like irrationally, I can't get rid of it, you know, and it's because I built the desk myself. And that's the entire point of the IKEA effect. The IKEA effect is a cognitive bias where people place more value on things they've helped create, even if it's harder, even if the item is imperfect, which mine certainly is. And so when you apply this concept to go to market strategy, it can help you boost everything from retention to product love to even lifetime value.
- [02:18]
Daniel
And we know this sounds great in theory, but I know this wouldn't be a go to market play without us breaking it down. So let's break down why this works.
- [02:31]
Tamara Graminski
We will. Okay, I'm going to start with Ikea and then we will talk about other examples, but because it's named after Ikea, we want to start there. So IKEA figured out that they could lower costs and increase customer satisfaction, which seemed like two opposing things, by doing one thing making you assemble the product yourself. And so when people build their own furniture, they actually report higher satisfaction. There's studies around this that prove that this is true. And it's not just because, oh, it's cheaper because I bought it from Ikea in a flat pack, but it's because they've invested, they've built it, they spent time with it, and so they value the item more, even if the drawer is a little crooked.
- [03:13]
Daniel
And I also think for someone who's not good at building furniture, you have this sense of pride showing people, hey, I built this bookshelf. Hey, I built this desk. Rather than you just bought that desk from a random brand. So that's also something that is mentally in. In that psychology of it. But why does this make us love furniture more?
- [03:40]
Tamara Graminski
It's exactly what you said, which is really, that labor leads to the love. And so furniture, it's an easy kind of way to understand. And now I think people might be saying, okay, but how does this possibly relate to software? For example? I'm not building the software, so I have some examples. First, let's start with a B2B example. I want to use Notion. Everyone knows I love Notion. I like to turn to them time and time again. When you sign up for Notion, it really gives you a blank canvas. And it says, build whatever you want your way. Right. If you want a task tracker, you can build it. If you want a content calendar, you can build it. If you want a second brain, you can build that too. But even though they have templates, the templates aren't perfect. They're starting points. You actually need to take that template and make it your own. And so that act of building creates ownership over your notion space. And so it's not just notion, it's your notion. Like, I know, Daniel, you and I both use Notion. And if I looked into your account or you looked into mine, they would feel like completely different products. And so this IKEA style, build it yourself model is a really big reason why Notion users are so loyal. It's not just a functional piece of software, it's their software, their workspace.
- [04:57]
Daniel
Yeah. I mean, when you build something yourself or. It also reminds me of another example, too, of this in psychology. But I don't know if it's exactly the same feeling, but just the Betty Crocker, just add one egg example, just add an egg. It makes you feel accomplished. When they could have just said, here are the ingredients. But they just said, and put it in the microwave and cook this. But just adding an egg is made them feel invested in cooking, cooking that product. So I think that's something that also comes to mind when I think that. But I know by building your own setup, tomorrow's would be extremely organized. Mine looks like organized chaos, but it makes us both invest in the product. So. So users feel more invested when they do this. Am I correct?
- [05:49]
Tamara Graminski
That's exactly it. So it's whether you're actually adding that extra egg to the cake mix or you're tweaking what your notion looks like because you're co creating, you do feel more invested in the end, which means that customers will often report higher commitment to the product and higher satisfaction. So I brought another example as well. And this time I want to talk about Spotify Wrapped. This might feel sneaky and you're prob thinking how Spotify wrapped co creation because technically you're not building anything. You're just listening to music on Spotify. But if you think about it over time, you're actually curating your own story. And so when Wrapped drops in December and it shows you your top artist, your most listened to song, your music personality, it feels like you made this because you kind of did by listening to every song that you listen to throughout the year. And because of that, people feel so proud of it. They screenshot it, they share it on social. And I don't know about you, but every time my Spotify rap comes out, like I feel pride, I feel like I'm more connected to Spotify. And so Spotify has turned this like strange passive listening activity into this active identity building experience. And I think that's actually the IKEA effect at work.
- [07:13]
Daniel
One thing that I hate to admit is sometimes I'm listening to music during the year and I think about my Spotify rap. This might be a top song. Even though I shouldn't be gaming the system, I should just be listening to the music. But for example, I watched the Bob Dylan movie and I'm like, I love Bob Dylan. I want Bob Dylan to be in the top five. So I'll listen to Bob Dylan just so I can get Bob Dylan in the top five. But if someone wants to use the IKEA effect today, what should they do?
- [07:45]
Tamara Graminski
Love that question. So there's a few ways that you can incorporate it into your go to market strategy. And really the heart of all of them is we want to make your users feel like co creators, not just consumers. So the first one is let them build something and get to it fast. So even if you don't control the product, which I Know, a lot of marketers don't. You can still create marketing experiences that feel personal and hands on. So, for example, you can let users choose their own onboarding path. We've all seen that screen where it's like, what do you want to accomplish today? Right. You can share templates like Notion does that they can tweak, or you can even kind of do some gamification, like little quizzes or tools at the very beginning that then generate custom results. The moment someone customizes something, even just a little bit, research shows that they start to feel ownership and that's where connection really begins. The second thing you can do is you can add customization options wherever you can. And so if you do have some say in the product experience or working with the product team, push for simple ways that users can make it their own. This could be as simple as letting them adjust the layout, the theme, maybe which features appear on their homepage. It could be something like building in, like save your favorites or something even as simple as updating your logo so that it feels like your space when you come in. These little touches really help it make it feel like your product belongs to the customer, not to you, the company. And then finally, and I think this is more of a nod to the Spotify example, celebrate what your customer is creating. So once they've built or personalized something, you want to shine a light on it, right? So showing off progress with milestones, whether it's emails or in app milestones, as you move through, I always like to think of the Asana unicorn that kind of shoots across the screen. You can use data, kind of like Spotify does, to recap their activity or achievements and really just turn it into something that's shareable. Maybe they're not sharing it on social media, but maybe they're going to share it with a coworker or just something that they can be proud of themselves. Because we know at the end of the day with the Ikea fact, the more that someone's proud of what they've built, the longer they will stick around and the higher chance they will actually tell their friends and colleagues about it too.
- [10:04]
Daniel
Yeah, going back to Notion and Canva and all those products, I love also how they've made a whole market out of selling Notion templates and selling Canva templates because it's so customizable, the platform. And if you give someone a chance to upload their custom ability and share it with people, they feel very proud. Or even going one step further, giving them chance to sell their customer, they're even more proud as a user and they become more and more raving fans because they can make a little money on that. So I do love something that you said is which I think I know marketers don't have influence in product a lot, but we do have the ears of the customer. So we should be saying, hey, customers would this would make LTV skyrocket if we just let them add the logo and brand colors to the space. It's an easy fix.
- [11:07]
Tamara Graminski
Exactly.
- [11:09]
Daniel
So that was a crash course on Ikea effect. I do have one piece from Ikea. I did not build it. I got someone else. One thing about me that you need to know is I'm not good with building things. I do not know why it turns into something terrible. It takes me 10, 20 hours. I get frustrated. But tomorrow is really great at it. So you could see all different brains at work right now. But bottom line of all this is if they if your customer or your user can build it, they'll feel more value in your product or your service. So the more you can have your users feel like creators, the longer they will stick around based on the Psyche effect. So thank you again for joining in and until next week, thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.