When quite young children select gifts for others, they will often start out thinking about what they themselves would like to have. The recipient’s preferences may not be granted adequate priority. The safeguard is that an adult is often there to guide the young child’s selection.
When teens shop for gifts in your store, guidance of that precise sort is less necessary. The added intellectual and emotional maturity bestows an ability to appreciate other people’s perspectives. But another bias appears, and it’s strongest when the teen gift shopper places high importance on being thoughtful. Researchers at University of Cincinnati and University of Florida saw it in adults as well. It’s the discomfort with selecting the same gift for more than one recipient. This happens even when the gift shopper knows a certain item would be an ideal choice for a group of recipients.
It also happens when the gift shopper says the recipients don’t know each other. This motivation for variety seeking is a desire to think of each friend or family member as distinctive. It’s not so much a fear of embarrassment at people finding out they got the same gift from your shopper.
You don’t want to set off a different kind of embarrassment in the teen shoppers by trying to talk them out of the need to make every gift purchase different. At the same time, if what you’re carrying in your store would be an ideal choice for many recipients, you’d prefer to have the teen make a multiple purchase from you.
The Cincinnati/Florida research findings indicate that a solution to the problem is a sophisticated version of what the adult companion does with the young child shopping for gifts. Encourage the teen to be thoughtful by thinking about what present would make the recipient happiest, even if it’s the same item others receive.
What friends and family will think about the gift is highly important to adolescents, according to researchers at Temple University, Jerusalem College of Technology, and University of Haifa. Teens use gifting to influence the impressions others have of them. They usually want the gift to strengthen the relationship by showing ways in which they are similar to the gift recipient. Yet, in other cases, they prefer to select a gift which carries as neutral a message about the relationship as possible.
Help the teen clarify the message she wants to deliver.
Click below for more:
Discover What the Gift-Giver Expects in Giving
Build Self-Esteem of Your Teen Customers
Accept Shopper Concerns About Acceptance
No comments:
Post a Comment