Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

by Rory Sutherland

In the 1950s, the General Mills food company launched a line of cake mixes under the Betty Crocker brand that included all the dry ingredients, including milk and eggs. All you needed to do was add water, mix and stick the pan in the oven – what could go wrong? However, despite the many benefits of this miracle product, it did not sell well, and even the Betty Crocker name could not convince anyone to buy it. General Mills brought in a team of psychologists to find out why consumers were avoiding it. One of their explanations was guilt: the product was so damned easy to make compared to traditional baking that people felt they were cheating. The fact that the cake tasted excellent and received plaudits didn’t help – this simply meant that the ‘cook’ felt awkward about getting more credit than they had earned. In response to these results, General Mills added a little psycho-logical alchemy – or ‘benign bullshit’. They revised the instructions on the packaging to make baking less convenient: as well as water, the housewife was charged with adding ‘a real egg’ to the ingredients. When they relaunched the range with the slogan ‘Just Add an Egg’, sales shot up. The psychologists believed that doing a little more work made womenfn1 feel less guilty, while still saving time, but making just enough effort to give the sense of having contributed to the cake’s creation. There is a name for the addition of consumer effort to increase someone’s estimation of value. It should perhaps ...