Show How Your Freebies Go to the Deserving

The Academy Awards ceremony is tomorrow, and the preparations have been underway for a while. Counting the votes, polishing the Oscar statuettes, giving away loot to celebrities.
     Regarding this last one, the Wall Street Journal reports that “gifting suites” in luxury hotels around Hollywood are open for business. The business of these platinum-grade pop-up stores is to offer to the stars lots of exclusive jewelry, designer fashions, precious skin-care potions, $3,000 Polaris bicycles, and close-to-release digital gadgets. The objective of the proprietors is to capture, for use in ad campaigns, photographs of the celebrities posing with the items.
     Not all the stars targeted for gifts flow in with wide open arms. The WSJ article quotes a publicist as warning her clients about how consumers can envy a celebrity whom the consumers believe doesn’t deserve to get something for nothing.
     The same sort of warning applies to retailers selling the products which would be in the photos. According to research findings from Tilburg University in the Netherlands, when a shopper believes another person earned the right to the advantages of owning a product, that shopper is willing to pay a premium for owning the product themselves. The extra money is like a tribute to the respected person. In the research, people who had this benign envy of someone owning an iPhone, for instance, were willing to pay an average of €80 extra for their own iPhone.
     However, if the shopper believes the other person doesn’t deserve the good fortune, a desire arises to show that what the other person has isn’t so great, after all. In the research study, people with this malicious envy were also willing to spend more money. But on a competing product.
     This ricochet reaction is related to schadenfreude, which means delighting in the misery of others. The word made it into an episode of  “The Simpsons” where Ned’s business is failing. Homer’s overjoyed. When Lisa defines schadenfreude, Homer replies, “Those Germans have a word for everything.”
     Psychologists at University of Kentucky conclude that schadenfreude comes from envy. We resent that the undeserving star has gotten a freebie, so we devalue the item by seeking something else instead.
     The celebrities’ way to handle this is to take items, then publically donate them. Your way of navigating through the different types of envy should be to show how any items you give away go to the deserving.

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