Gifting consumption in social relationships

Abstract

Gifting is prevalent in our daily life. Consumers send gifts in multiple sociocultural contexts. For example, consumers send birthday gifts to their friends, holiday gifts to family members, or housewarming gifts to a new neighbor. A unique difference distinguishing a gift from a normal product is the social value embedded in it. Gifts have extensive social values and they help givers establish and maintain social relationships, and serve as a symbolic communication of giver’s thoughts and feelings toward the recipient. Despite the growing attention to gifting, relatively little research has explored what kinds of gifts can help gift-givers initiate a romantic relationship or maintain the current social relationship with older adults. To address these two issues, in the current thesis, I first review the existing literature on gifting research and product gender. Following that, in Chapter 3, I explore how the presence of the romantic motive influences consumers’ gift choices. Fourteen studies demonstrate that the presence of the romantic motive triggers consumers’ intention to signal attraction, which in turn leads to a higher intention to choose gender-specific products as gifts to recipients. Consistent with this mechanism, this effect attenuates or diminishes when gift-givers do not want to disclose their romantic feelings or when gift-givers are in the relationship maintenance stage with gift recipients. Moreover, this effect appears, even at the cost of forgoing another identity-consistent gift; whereas gift recipients indeed perceive that givers have more romantic feelings toward them when they receive a gender-specific (vs. gender-neutral) gift. In Chapter 4, I investigate how the recipients’ age influences consumers’ preferences for gender-neutral products. Two studies indicate that consumers are more likely to choose gender-neutral products as gifts for older adults (vs. younger adults). Taken together, these findings contribute to gifting literature, romantic motive literature, aging literature, and product gender literature. These findings also provide significant insights to marketers about how to better position and promote their products for those looking for gifts for romantic targets or older adults.