Gift Giving & Consumer behaviour

Gift-giving is an important tradition, especialy for marketers. Christmas accounts for nearly 40% of all gifts bought in the UK during the year and remains by far the main gifting occasion.

Our involvement in gifts buying depends on what we are going to buy. A customer's approach to purchasing a product or service is influenced by their situation - whether they have money and how important, frequent, risky or urgent the purchase is to them in their situation.

Customers make more of an effort, and become more involved, if the purchase is relatively important to them - particularly if they have no previous experience of buying such a product or service.
On the other hand, if the item being purchased is low value and frequently bought, like a jar of coffee, it follows that the buyer will spend less time and effort and will have less involvement with the purchase.
These frequent, inexpensive purchases generally have little risk, and require less information. These kind of purchase situations are referred to as 'Low Involvement Purchases'. In these situations, consumers can fall into a routine purchasing pattern which requires little thought and even less effort.

Alternatively, an expensive high risk infrequent purchase like your first computer will require a lot of detailed information and careful analysis before deciding which machine. This is called 'High Involvement'. Here the consumer goes through an extensive problem solving process - searching and collecting information, evaluating it and eventually deciding on a particular choice.
There is a third type of buying situation. This is where the customer has had some experience of buying a particular type of product or service before. There is less risk attached and less information is required. This is called 'Limited Problem Solving'.

If you would like to find out more about this topic-take a look on this page: http://www.multimediamarketing.com/mkc/buyerbehaviour/

According to Laurent & Kapferer (1985) consumer’s level of involvement will be affected by four components:
1.Importance & risk (FTPEPS)
*Finance
*Time
*Performance
*Ego
*Physical
*Social
2.Probability of making a bad purchase
3.Pleasure value of product category
4.Sign value of product category

There are also four levels of involvement:


High involvement think-feel-do

Low involvement think-do-feel

Experiential/impulse feel-do-think

Behavioural influence do-think-feel


"Think-feel-do" model:






I read some articles from WARC about this topic and I think I foud some interesting things:

"The buyer can often feel unsure or distrustful of a new provider and a new product which will involve them changing the way they do things and learning new things. They need assurance about the provider and product. In these high-involvement purchase markets the buyer initially is driven by the need to learn first, so they can evaluate based on sound information and feel assured, before they become comfortable to complete (do) a buying transaction. Buyers will be reluctant to get involved with a brand (personality) that is not engaging, attractive and credible."

"Gift shopping is the ultimate in 'emotional consumerism', since gift giving is all about emotionally connecting giver and recipient. Whenever consumer shopping behaviour is driven by emotion, the shopper's goal is to buy a thing to achieve a special feeling, enhance an emotional experience or deepen an emotional reaction. In other words, the gift itself (the noun) is the means to an end to strengthen the emotional connection between individuals. The challenge for retailers and marketers is how to enhance the 'gifting' experience."

Store choice for gifts is controlled by the left brain, but gift selection is right-brain dominated.
Givers use different criteria when choosing a store to shop for a gift and what to buy once they are there. They select the store based on rational, left-brain factors, such as where they will find the best prices, while they select the gift primarily on emotional, right-brain factors.

I think that these graphs are really interesting:

GIFT ATTRIBUTES RATED 'VERY IMPORTANT'



TRENDS IN GIFT SPENDING




What's more...
"Men are only significantly involved in a few gifting occasions, such as Mother's Day, Valentine's Day and anniversaries. Consequently, the main recipients of male gifts tend to be their partners and mothers. There are still barriers in the British consumer's psyche about malemale to gifting and, hence, it remains very small. The good news for women is that men tend to spend significantly more on individual gifts (31.04 versus 19.04 for women). The categories in which the share of male purchasing is highest are: music, computer hardware and software, flowers, household personal items, and videos and DVDs.
Women tend to be in charge of most of the household gifting, ranging from presents for children and family relatives to those for schoolteachers. Therefore, not surprisingly, women buy 65% of all gifts. This proportion is even higher for specific occasions such as christenings, newborn babies, housewarmings and birthdays. In addition to this, femaletofemale (friend) gifting is also a key dynamic, accounting for more than one in ten gifts bought by women."



Farther reading about Consumer Behavior:
http://smib.vuw.ac.nz:8081/WWW/ANZMAC2001/anzmac/AUTHORS/pdfs/Quester1.pdf
http://proactive.sis.pitt.edu/suleehs/Journal/paper5.pdf