According to some researches, the enthusiasm consumers feel for furniture they built themselves may not be, strictly speaking, rational.
It’s called the “Ikea Effect” and it holds that consumers start placing outsized value on things they built themselves, simply because they mixed their labor with it and thus started viewing it as a piece of fine craftsmanship.
Can there be an Ikea effect when it comes to banking services? Will consumers ever feel about fiscal responsibility the emotions currently reserved for DIY bookshelves? Billionaire Ingvar Kamprad –the man who brought the world Ikea –seems to think so.
His bank– Ikano Bank — is decided to draw in “savers” by offering them the chance to win approximately $15K. All they had to do was play a computer game that punished those players who spent too much on big ticket items.
Based on the popular “Flappy Bird” gaming app—the player who best eschewed extravagance and (literally) protected their piggy banks took home the cash prize.
“We want to get new customers to discover Ikano and do something for small savers, in whom most major banks aren’t that interested,” Emma Roslund Johansson, a sales manager at Ikano’s Swedish operations, said in a telephone interview with Bloomberg.
Whether protecting a winged piggy bank will spur enthusiasm for responsible money management in the way that using an Allen wrench will make one truly love their headboard, remain to be seen. Still the promotion certainly brought consumers to Ikano Bank’s digital doors.
For the approximately 20 days the game promotion ran, it was played 1.52 million times.
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