Just add water
When General Mills and Pillsbury began selling cake mixes bakers tried them for a while, but sales slipped. It seemed like a great idea to make baking easier by just adding water, so what happened?
With the advice of a psychologist/marketing consultant General Mills changed the recipe to require the baker to add an egg, and sales went up.
The story goes that a survey found that homemakers felt like there wasn’t enough work involved to enable them to enjoy the rewards of baking a homemade cake. They wanted to feel that they had really done the preparation, which wasn’t possible if they just added water. And the result: the cakes turned out better with real eggs.
No matter what you’re doing, if you’re invested it matters more.
By signing up for a class or personal training sessions, you’re accountable to your mentor or coach (and yourself). You’re going to show up and do the work, and the results will be a better, stronger, fitter you. The work involved is your sweat equity. You invested, and earned it.
The story remains one of the most enduring in marketing (ref. Seth Godin)
Whether the cake mix story is entirely true doesn’t really matter. Being accountable does.
