The IKEA Effect Without the Honesty

There is a particular sort of dishonesty that only modern marketing can perfect. Not the crude lie, but the insinuation. The wink. The carefully chosen surname.

Call it “Magnusson”. Or “Hjort”. Or “Nordvik”. Wrap it in sober greys and blacks, sprinkle a bit of runic seriousness over the packaging, and let the buyer do the rest. The implication is never stated, because it does not need to be. You are meant to feel Sweden. Clean benches. Precision steel. A man in a wool jumper who would rather die than ship rubbish.

None of this exists, of course. What exists is a sourcing spreadsheet, a container ship, and a margin target.

This is branding as cultural cosplay. The reputation of Scandinavian engineering was not created by a font or a name ending in “-son”. It was earned over decades by companies that obsessed over tolerances, materials, and longevity because that was their competitive edge. What we see now is that reputation being strip-mined by people whose only loyalty is to quarterly profit.

The product itself is almost beside the point. The screwdriver may be fine. It may last years. Or it may round off on the third stubborn screw and end its days at the back of a drawer. That is not the offence. The offence is the pretence. The idea that trust, painstakingly built by others, can be rented cheaply and discarded once the market moves on.

This is late-stage capitalism’s favourite trick. Do not build quality. Borrow its accent. Do not invest in engineering. Invest in implication. Culture becomes a prop, heritage a costume, and honesty an optional extra that gets trimmed when the margins tighten.

What makes it worse is that it works. Not because people are stupid, but because we are busy, tired, and surrounded by noise. A Nordic-sounding name cuts through the fog. It feels safer. It feels less cynical than the reality behind it.

And that is the real cost. Not the price of the tool, but the steady erosion of trust. When everything is branding theatre, nothing means anything. Names become hollow. Reputations become transferable assets. The only thing left that is real is the profit extraction.

So yes, it is irritating. Not because someone bought you a screwdriver, but because you were briefly cast as an extra in a small, cynical play about authenticity. The screws will turn. The marketing will keep lying. And somewhere, a genuine engineer will wonder how their life’s work ended up reduced to a syllable on a blister pack.