Who was Betty Crocker?

If you grew up when I did, you probably remember the iconic voice and image of the fictional character Betty Crocker, the so-called "Dear Abby" of cooking.  No, she was not a real person, but rather a fictional character created in 1921 by the Washburn-Crosby Company (later, General Mills) in 1921 to give a personalized response to consumer product questions.  The company's advertising department realized that housewives would want advice from a fellow woman, so they created a personality that the women answering the letters sent in by consumers could use in their replies.  The first name "Betty" was selected because the advertising executives considered it a cheery, all-American name.  The last name "Crocker" was selected in honor of William Crocker, a Washburn Crosby Company director.  The portrait of Betty Crocker was first commissioned in 1936 and has been updated several times since its original creation, in order to keep up with changing fashion and hairstyles.  The red spoon logon containing her signature was added in 1954.

Your probably wondering why I chose to start this post with a story about a fictional character used in an advertising campaign, albeit a highly successful one.  As it turns out, there is a leadership lesson here!  Apparently, at some point in the 1950's, General Mills launched their line of boxed cake mixes under the Betty Crocker brand.  The box of cake mix included all of the necessary ingredients for baking a cake, including both milk and eggs in powdered form.  In order to bake a cake, all someone had to do was add water to the mix, stir it up together, pour it in a pan, and bake it in the oven.  It was a huge time-saver, and the recipe was virtually error-free.  General Mills thought that they had a sure winner on their hands.

Contrary to expectations, however, the boxed cake mix failed to sell.  The team at General Mills had no idea why their product wasn't selling like wild fire.  They brought in a team of experts to help them figure out what to do next.  After conducting a number of focus group sessions, a team of psychologists suggested that the reason that no one was buying the cake mix was that General Mills had made their product too simple, effort-less, and convenient.  In other words, housewives were feeling guilty that the cake took almost no effort to bake.  As Drew Boyd writes in Psychology Today, "It saved so much time and effort when compared with the traditional cake baking routine that they felt they were deceiving their husbands and guests. In fact, the cake tasted so good that people thought women were spending hours baking. Women felt guilty about getting more credit than they deserved. So they stopped using the product."

So, against all conventional wisdom, General Mills made the boxed cake mix less simple and easy.  They took the powdered egg out of the mix.  Now, all someone had to do to bake a cake was add water and eggs!  General Mills relaunched the new product with the slogan "Add an Egg" and sales of their Betty Crocker instant cake mix soared.  Just the one additional step changed consumers' perceptions about the product and removing a source of guilt.

We've encountered this kind of effect before in the past (see my post from a few years ago).  A few years ago, the cognitive psychologist Dan Ariely published the results of a study in the Journal of Consumer Psychology on what he called the  "IKEA effect".  Ariely and his team conducted four studies in which study subjects were asked to build IKEA boxes, fold Origami, and build Lego sets.  At the end of the study, subjects were given the option to purchase their creations, or even someone else's creation.  Subjects were consistently willing to pay significantly more money for their own creations than someone else's creation.  

Ariely's "IKEA effect" (so named to honor the Swedish company whose products require assembly) reminds me of another famous study by the cognitive psychologists Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch, and Richard Thaler on something known as the "endowment effect".  In this study, subjects who had been given a coffee mug were offered a chance to trade it for some pens or sell it for a certain amount of money.  The price that subjects were willing to sell their mugs was almost twice as much as the price that they were originally willing to pay for it.  Ariely also demonstrated the endowment effect in another study, in which students were willing to sell four NCAA basketball tournament tickets for twice as much as they would have been willing to pay for them.  In other words, once we own something, we tend to want to hold on to it and are reluctant to part with it.

Whether one chooses to call it the "IKEA effect", the endowment effect, or the "Betty Crocker effect", the simple fact remains that the more involved we are in creating something (and that "something" can be tangible or intangible), the greater our sense of ownership and accomplishment.  We see evidence of this effect in leadership too.  Instead of handing down finished, top-down mandates, leaders should involve teams early in the process, encouraging them to help "build" the solution. When leaders give up some level of responsibility and agency to the other members of the team, the team feels a greater sense of pride and ownership.  In short, they feel like they are true stakeholders in a project, which, in turn, reduces or even eliminates their resistance to change. Ultimately, that sense of ownership greatly increases the chances of a successful implementation, project completion, or change initiative.