Lecture Twelve: Gift Giving

This was our last lecture of the year and because of the run up to Christmas, Ruth decided to theme the lecture around gift giving. What we were supposed to take away from this lecture is that gift giving encompasses high-involvement purchasing for the customer. This is something that i will touch on but will be more in depth in later posts.

In the lecture we were asked to make a list of all the people that we intend to buy Christmas presents, or who we would normally buy Christmas presents for. Now I love Christmas because I love being able to give people presents when they are not expecting one like nan and my auntie etc. Next to the list of people we had to put what we felt or thought about buying presents for these people, he's a short version of my list some you can get an idea:

Mom - Easy
Sister - Easy and Fun
Girlfriend - Very, Very Hard.. Worrying a bit.
Nan - Challenging to Fun
Auntie - Easy

So you can see from the list above how the involvement levels react to which person I'm buying for, I mean yes they are all high involvement purchases but some are harder than others; for example it's hard to find something for my nan but I enjoy the challenge but when it comes to my girlfriend I panic because in my eyes it has to be perfect. This type of consumer can both be the easiest and the hardest person to market to, Why? well because it's hard because the customer (me) would be very picky when looking for the perfect gift, even something as wrapping could determine the purchase or not. On the other hand it can be easy because as long as I have the money I would pay anything for the perfect gift.

According to Pamela Danzinger "Gift shopping is the ultimate in 'emotional consumerism', since gift giving is all about emotionally connecting giver and recipient."
(Admap, (2004) The business of gifts, Issue 450: p43-46)

Now from this quote I love the use of 'emotional consumerism' because the emotion part is where the high involvement comes in, after all if there was no emotion involved in the purchase decision there would not be much involvement. Now below is an image of Kotler's Buyer Decision Process:

The reason why I am showing you this is because it is a good way to show how a customer thinks when they are going through a high involvement purchase. I will speak about this more in later posts but the basics is that the customer realises they need something, they shop around, buy the product and then evaluate their purchase decision.

Something else which also interests me about the way customers think when buying gifts is when it comes to what part of the brain deals with what the whole left vs. right brain. Now when it comes to selecting the store to buy the gift from, it is all controlled by the left brain, choosing the best stores, the one you know etc and then as you'd imagine the actually gift choice is decided by the right side which deals in random functions, spontaneity and impulse. There are also a set of almost tick boxes that must all be ticked off in order for us to buy a gift, they are:

Would the Recipient like this gift? - This is probably the hardest out of them because naturally customers will not think that the recipient will like their gift until they actually open it and the customer can see the reaction of the recipient.

What would the Customer like to give? - This comes down the the customers own personality, for instance a impulsive person is more likely to give a gift that is completely random where as say a more practical person would be more likely to give a girt that has a more practical application.

What is the occasion? - This does pretty much explain it self because you may by a gift for a house-warming that you wouldn't buy for a birthday.

What is my budget? - Simple if you haven't got the money you cannot buy the gift. However if you can find it cheaper else where then you can :).

From this you can get a good idea of gift giving and why we do it. In the last couple of decades we have changed from what was know as a cocoon society of consumers when we mainly focused of buying things for ourselves to make us happy but now we have moved away from that and started feeling the benefits from giving to others and im sure it will only continue to grow.