Summary
With this lesson on the IKEA effect, students will analyze IKEA's innovative business strategies, from flat-packing to its unique store layouts. Through video comprehension, vocabulary exercises, and grammar practice focusing on the passive voice, learners will enhance their understanding of business concepts, design principles, and persuasive language related to consumer behavior and product creation.
Activities
Students reflect on personal experiences with furniture assembly and shopping, and discuss the psychological impact of building their own items, linking it to the IKEA effect.
Learners watch a video detailing IKEA's business model, answering comprehension questions about its store design, the IKEA effect, reverse engineering, and cost-reduction innovations.
Students practice business and design vocabulary through contextual guessing, matching terms like Democratic Design and flat-packing to definitions, and completing sentences with relevant phrasal verbs.
The lesson includes grammar exercises on the passive voice, transforming active sentences about IKEA's history and processes to highlight the action rather than the agent.
Vocabulary focus
Key terms include runaway success, fixed-path, coined, flat-packed, manifesto, mass market, value proposition, The IKEA Effect, Democratic Design, and Reverse Engineer. Phrasal verbs like set up, work backward, and buy into are also practiced, enhancing students' business and design lexicon.
Grammar focus
This lesson centers on the passive voice (be + past participle). Students learn its use for describing processes and effects, particularly when the actor is unknown or unimportant. Exercises involve rewriting active sentences about IKEA into the passive voice to achieve a more formal and academic tone.
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