From me to you... (Gift giving)

We have all seen the TV commercials about holiday gifts: Mum loves that diamond necklace and Dad flips for the sports car in the driveway with a big bow on top. But wait a minute! How can we afford to buy such expensive gifts? Most kids and a lot of students don't even have jobs. So what do you do if you want to give gifts to the important people in your life? How much thought do you put in to it? Is gift giving always an involved decision?

These are just a few things we thought about at the beginning of this week’s class.
After making a list of all the people we have to buy for this Christmas, we also discussed how hard, easy, fun or boring, it was buying for these people.

Consumer involvement plays a large role in gift giving as it is the level of personal importance evoked by a stimulus leading to motivation to process motivation, i.e. how much do we care about the person we are buying for. It is possible that we have an absolute lack of interest in gift giving (Inertia).

Kotler outlines a Buyer decision process which begins by considering various approaches consumers use when faced with a purchase decision. It then focuses on three of the steps in the direction process: how consumers recognize the problem, or need for a product; their search for information about product choices; and the way in which they evaluate alternatives to arrive at a decision.

Below is a diagram outlining the stages in consumer decision-making.

We must understand that some purchase decisions are more important than others thus, the amount or effort we put into each one differs. This is an important factor to consider when we discuss gift giving. In order to measure consumer involvement, Laurent and Kapferer (1985) argue that it will be affected by four components:

1. Importance and Risk (Taking into consideration FTPEPS; Finance, Time, Physical, Ego, Performance, Social).
2. Probability of making a bad purchase.
3. Pleasure value of product category.
4. Sign value of product category (Brand recognition)

After taking this into consideration, we were faced with a task:
Using FTPEPS consider the likely level of involvement of; 1) a 21 year old and b) a 46 year old
1) Buying a car
2) Buying a mobile phone
3) Buying underwear for your partner.

This discussion proved very interesting. Our group concluded that there would be vast differences in the reasons why the products listed above were purchased. When buying a car, a 21 year old may be more likely to go for one that is smaller in size and that looks ‘cool’, where as a 46 year old may be more likely to go for a family sized car and one that is safe and economical.
When purchasing a mobile phone, we concluded that a 21 year old would go for a phone with lots of extra features and one that may indicate social status. An iphone for example may do this, whereby it is deemed ‘cool’ and friends may be envious. A 46 year old may go for a standard phone which does the bare minimum expected by a phone (i.e. Call & text). When discussing their phone, we would expect to hear a 46 year old say ‘It does the job’! (Maybe we are being slightly stereotypical!)

When discussing number 3 we had quite a laugh! It seems that age is not the main factor here but gender. According to our class, females would feel a lot more comfortable buying underwear for their partner, however males would find it a highly embarrassing and a very awkward situation.