Betty Crocker should have paid more attention to the lab monkeys.
Why?
Well, in 1947 the Betty Crocker company introduced the first boxed cake mix. Just add water and bake for a delicious ginger cake. It was simplicity itself. The only problem was that, with consumers of the day, it was a flop.
A little research showed that the problem wasn’t in the flavor or texture of the end product … it was in the ease with which the end product was arrived at. It seems that housewives of the day really enjoyed the process of baking a cake. Take away the process and you take away the fun.
That’s the reason that just about every cake mix sold today calls for the addition of other ingredients. Crack an egg or two. Pour in some water. Measure out a little cooking oil. The process is a selling point of the product.
But you really can’t blame Betty Crocker for not knowing this.
As it turns out, it wasn’t until two years later that Harry Harlow at the University of Wisconsin learned – and then ignored – something important from the behavior of his lab monkeys.
In his experiments, Dr. Harlow was researching the strength of various motivations on his monkeys. To test the motivations, he invented a simple puzzle in which the primates had to pull a pin, flip a latch and lift a panel … in that order.
Upon introducing the puzzle, Harlow was surprised to see the monkeys working diligently at unraveling the puzzle’s process with the absence of any training or reward for their behavior. In fact, what really blew his mind was that, upon introducing food rewards for “solving” the puzzle, the monkeys’ interest in the puzzle actually decreased and even those who ran through the process did it more slowly and with less enthusiasm.
Harlow repeated the experiment in a variety of ways and was finally faced with the conclusion that in addition to the widely accepted behavior drivers of fulfilling biological needs and pain avoidance, there was a third drive, too. This third drive was one in which the process provided its own intrinsic motivation. It was a breakthrough idea for 1949, but Harlow wasn’t really interested. He moved on to other areas of research (perhaps he ate a lot of box cake mixes) and the idea was more or less tabled until more recently.
In the late 1990s research on human motivation, Dr. Richard Maddock helped re-discover Harlow’s “third drive.” He rechristened it the “Play” motivation and found that, along with his other 9 basic human motivations it went a long way to helping explain human and, more specifically, consumer behavior.
You don’t have to look very far to find examples of marketers leveraging this motivation. Home improvement stores romanticize the work of renovation. Frozen food companies present pre-packaged meals that we can steam, toss, shake or otherwise manipulate. And, of course, toy manufacturers offer a host of models, kits and blocks that clearly pitch the process over the product.
Is there some “do-it-yourself” element you can add to your product or promise in your marketing that can help engage your audience?
Try it. You might find that increasing sales may be child’s play.