Elsevier

Journal of Retailing

Volume 97, Issue 2, June 2021, Pages 191-206
Journal of Retailing

Picking Gifts for Picky People

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretai.2020.07.003Get rights and content

Highlights

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    A survey of 7000+ shoppers indicated that 4 out of 10 gifts are for someone picky.

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    Per the NYT, “the biggest challenge for gift givers is shopping for picky people.”

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    The judgment, “picky person,” is someone with narrow-and-unpredictable preferences.

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    When people choose gifts for picky people, they buck typical gift-giving norms.

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    A strategy for retailers is tested, which helps consumers choose for picky people.

Abstract

Shoppers report that 39% of their holiday gift-purchases are for someone “picky.” However, despite the ubiquity of shopping for picky people, little research has examined how people choose gifts for picky people. In the present research, we define the “picky gift recipient” as someone perceived to have narrow and unpredictable preferences, and we show how shopping for someone picky alters gift giving behavior. We find that although gift giving norms prescribe that gift givers spend effort, time, and money on gifts to strengthen their social ties, an exception to this rule occurs when a gift recipient is picky. When shopping for someone picky, givers believe that increasing their resources on a gift will not result in greater recipient-satisfaction with the gift itself—a lay belief that ultimately demotivates givers, causing them to spend fewer resources on picky people (even picky friends). That said, we find that consumers are more willing to spend money on superficial gift-features for picky people, such as professional wrapping, to “dress up” their gifts. Based on this preference, we developed and tested a novel promotion strategy that retailers could implement to recoup some of the lost spending by consumers who are shopping for picky people. In all, this research contributes to the literature on gift giving dynamics, and provides insights more broadly into how shoppers negotiate the burden of shopping for someone whom they anticipate will not like their choice.

Section snippets

Pickiness

What does it mean to be viewed as “picky” by another person? While pickiness may be colloquially understood, there is no definition in psychology, decision making, or marketing of what it means to be picky (or to be viewed as picky). Moreover, we know of no research that has examined how the perceived pickiness of others affects the choices people make for others. This is surprising because researchers across the social sciences are concerned with how people make decisions, and pickiness is

Pickiness and Difficulty

In their seminal work on gift giving difficulty, Otnes and colleagues (1992, 1993 suggested that specific circumstances lead givers to perceive their gift recipients as “difficult” or “easy.” Providing a social roles interpretation to categorize recipients, Otnes, Lowrey and Kim (1993, p. 229) established that “the perception of recipients as easy or difficult stems from some aspect of the particular relationship between giver and recipient.” Otnes, Kim and Lowrey (1992) specified some of the

Gift Giving and Lay Beliefs

Much of the research on gift giving suggests that the purpose of gift giving is to improve social ties (Belk, 1979). With foreseeable social rewards associated with successful gift choices, gift givers willingly invest personal resources in gift selection, with the belief that their efforts will pay off and the giver-recipient relationship will be strengthened (or at least maintained) through their gifts (Belk, 1996; Belk & Coon, 1993). Further, gifts are deemed more “perfect” when the gift

Overview of Experiments

In the nine studies that follow, we examine perceived gift recipient pickiness and how it alters gift giving behavior. In Studies 1a and 1b, we test our definition of a “picky gift recipient” in two different ways—confirming that when givers judge a gift recipient to be “picky,” they believe s/he has narrow and unpredictable preferences. In Study 2, we investigate actual gift giving choices that people make in a store-like setting. When primed with recipient pickiness, we find that givers spend

Studies 1a and 1b

We defined a “picky gift recipient” as someone who is thought to have both narrow and unpredictable preferences. In this pair of studies, we test the veracity of this definition. In both studies, we used a 2 (narrow vs. broad preferences) × 2 (predictable vs. unpredictable preferences) between-subjects design, in which we manipulated the perceived narrowness and predictability of gift recipients’ preferences. According to our definition, individuals should be viewed as the pickiest in the cell

Study 2

In Study 2, we tested how people shop for a picky person in a mock retail setting. We tested how much money, time, and effort individuals would spend on picky recipients.

Study 3

Evidence from gift giving research suggests that it is culturally normative to buy more expensive gifts for socially-close recipients (i.e., friends) compared to socially-distant recipients (i.e., acquaintances) because costly gifts represent the value placed on the existing relationship (Saad & Gill, 2003; Tifferet, Saad, Meiri, & Ido, 2018; Waldfogel, 1993). However, would this gift giving norm hold when the close recipient is picky, or might recipient pickiness crowd out the effect of social

Study 4a

We theorized that givers have a lay belief of gift giving—givers believe that the more resources they spend on recipients, the more recipients will like their gifts. We predict, however, that when applied to a picky gift recipient, givers may believe that there is a weaker relationship between their resource-spending input and recipient-satisfaction output, rendering a lay belief that the correlation is relatively low or null. Which is to say that picky recipients are believed to dislike their

Study 4b

In Study 4b, we extend the results from Study 4a by testing the degree to which individuals believe giver-effort and recipient-satisfaction are correlated in 14 different gift giving situations containing choices that are difficult to make (cf. Otnes et al., 1992, Otnes et al., 1993), including the focal case of making a choice for a picky recipient.

Study 5

In Studies 3-4b, we found that givers not only have relatively pessimistic views about how much picky recipients will like their gifts, but more importantly, pessimistic views about how much any additional resource input will improve recipients’ expected gift-satisfaction. This pessimism does not hold for all difficult gift giving situations, suggesting once again that recipient pickiness is a unique form of gift giving difficulty. In Study 5, we test whether this altered lay belief of the

Study 6a

Thus far, our studies have uncovered that gift givers are consistently less motivated to spend resources on gifts for picky people. For retailers, this has negative implications for their revenue. Therefore, we ask: what can retailers do? The research on compensatory decision making would suggest that consumers who know that their option is weak on a central feature (e.g., gift choice) would be more likely to strengthen its peripheral features (Johnson & Meyer, 1984; Payne, Payne, Bettman, &

Study 6b

In Study 6b, we tested an idea based on promoting auxiliary gift items that retailers could implement to potentially recapture some of the fallout from consumers’ lack of motivation and spending when shopping for picky people. Study 6b examined whether gift givers will make different choices for picky people according to a novel promotional strategy of displaying multiple thumbnail images of a product (e.g., different pictures of a scarf) with images of the product in accompaniment with an

General Discussion

Across nine studies, the present work addresses the question of how gift givers cope when choosing gifts for picky gift recipients. When a gift recipient is perceived as picky, this corresponds to believing that the recipient has narrow and unpredictable preferences (Studies 1a and 1b), and leads to spending less money, effort, and time on them (Study 2)—a pattern that extends to even recipients who are close to the giver (Study 3). Going a step further, we found that gift givers have lay

Conclusion

In our findings, nearly 40% of recipients are called “picky” by gift givers. Yet despite its ubiquity, previous research has not examined how such gift choices are made. The current work is the first to define the pickiness construct in decision making, and to test how consumers cope with making choices for picky others. Based on the current work, it is clear that people have a lay belief about gift giving (a belief about the correlation between how much effort they spend and

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    • Cited by (0)

    1

    Andong Cheng ([email protected]) is an assistant professor of business administration in the marketing area at the Lerner College of Business and Economics, University of Delaware. Margaret Meloy ([email protected]) is a professor of marketing and Calvin E. and Pamela T. Zimmerman Fellow at the Smeal College of Business, Penn State University. Evan Polman ([email protected]) is an associate professor of marketing at the Wisconsin School of Business, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Portions of this work were presented at the 2014 Association for Consumer Research meeting and the 2015 Society for Personality and Social Psychology meeting. We are grateful to Dee Warmath for providing us with the opportunity to collect data on Black Friday shoppers, and furnishing us with the results. This work was supported by the Smeal College of Business Small Research Grants program to the first author.

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