Monday, 23 February 2009

Gift Giving 19-12-08

Involvement when buying friends and relatives presents can change depending on the relationship and whether they are easy or hard to buy for. During the Christmas period presents are exchanged allowing marketers to dress their products in a new way to make consumer buy because it’s Christmas!! Toblerone chocolate change their packaging as the Christmas season arrives.

This is to persuade individuals to buy it, but why do they buy the product? By understanding the involvement needed to buy chocolate for someone else will give this understanding.

Different products have high or low involvement when purchasing them. Kotler’s decision process, shows how quickly the brain will buy some products but will take longer on others.
This table shows the involvement with some products. A low involvement purchase would be one that could be routine on the shopping list, milk, bread, no thought actually goes into what is being purchased. A high involvement purchase would be a house or car, this would take a lot of time to think about the purchase as other brands would be involved leading to undertaking the decision process slowly. Thinking about the product, feeling/using the product and buying the product happen in different orders depending on the level on involvement. Here shows the order individuals undertake these stages depending on the level of involvement.
High Involvement think-feel-do – cars, technology.
Low Involvement think-do-feel – beans, bread
Experiential/impulse feel-do-think – chocolates, crisps
Behavioural influence do-think-feel – clothes

Laurent & Kapferer (1985) argued that the involvement in which the consumer undertakes is affected by four components.
Importance & risk (Finance, Time, Performance, Ego, Physical, Social): These six attributes, collectively, build up how the consumer will by the product and problem that may come with it.
Probability of making a bad purchase: if the product does not work or problems occur with it, making it not a worthless buy.
Pleasure value of product category: The enjoyment from the product or buying the product for someone (seeing how happy it makes them)
Sign value of product category: what others will think about the product and does it stand for anything.

When gift giving it is about the emotionally connecting the giver and the recipient. This emotional shopping aims at the goal of finding something special for that individual, with the gift communicating a message. Problems arise with gift giving when the giver’s and recipient’s value drivers differ (Danziger,2004).

When shopping takes place it’s the experience that matters to the buyer, this is why shops will decorate and products will slightly change their packaging. Shops know that this experience is important wanting the buyer to enjoy themselves and remember the experience. La Senza put scented beads into their bags allowing the consumer to be able to remember them when they arrive home, maximising pleasure. In this clip of Love Actually, over exaggeration is used to humour the way shops try to maximise pleasure using different plants, beads and ribbons. (Sorry about the bad picture!)





As it’s Christmas I found four Christmas commercials which clearly integrate Christmas with their advertisement. These are enjoyable as they use the colours associated with Christmas and snow, something everyone wishes for. Coke is a famous Christmas advert as they changed Father Christmas from green to red, many millennial babies will easily relate to it as this is when they know it is Christmas.



1 comment:

Ruth Hickmott said...

Nice job - good to see you blogging again