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IKEA lesson: DIY creates loyalty

May 3, 2009

Tampa Bay Online: The cult of IKEA can be explained through psychology. The Swedish retailer sells mountains of build-it-yourself furniture at modest prices, but the directions, famously, can be hard to comprehend.

"By the time you finish struggling with the instructions, you like it more," said Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at Duke University. Ariely can't say whether IKEA does this intentionally but he's pretty confident in his theory, which he began formulating while at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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