Mike Norton

Recent years have seen an explosion of efforts by companies to involve their customers more deeply in their operations, from product design and assembly (e.g., Converse and Mountain Dew) to creating and selecting advertisements (e.g., Doritos SuperBowl ads). But do such efforts pay off? How can the successor failureof such efforts be assessed? And what factors should companies considering these new forms of customer engagement have in mind as they explore these ideas?

Mike will discuss his research on what has come to be known as the IKEA Effect (a Harvard Business Review Breakthrough Idea in 2009)the increased value people have for products they assemble themselves from misshapen mugs from long-ago pottery classes to bookcases from the Swedish retailer. In particular, he shows that involving customers in co-creation requires a careful balance between two opposing forces. First, the task has to be difficult enough for customers to feel that the firm has really allowed them to accomplish somethingleading companies to increase the difficulty of tasks; second, however, tasks that are too complicated lead customers to blame the firm for wasting their time. Mike describes the results of many of his fun experiments in which he asks people to build things ranging from IKEA furniture to LEGO sets to origami, which reveal how to find the right balance between these forces.