Gift giving...

Christmas is one of the most wonderful times during whole year. People visit their family and friends, they have enough time to sit and talk, without any hurry. Taste of turkey, smell of Christmas tree, glam of candles and Santa Claus. There is also another part of Christmas which creates this magical atmosphere – gifts. It is nowadays an unavoidable part of celebration. Every single year, everyone of us has the same problem. What to buy? What are the dreams of our family and friends? How to make them happy? We are not even aware of the fact that we follow the hints given us by marketing specialists. Many researchers did an experiments and created theories related to people’s gift buying habits. Gift may be:

• Functional – utilitarian e.g kettle, toaster

• Symbolic – status symbols e.g good perfumes, expensive alcohol

• Hedonistic - for fun

Andrew Greshoff (University of Michigan) claim that our own preferences may be a serious problem, because the more we like something, the worst will be our conduct during buying a gift. In accordance to American research when we like item, we do not pay attention for its defects. But when a person does not like an item, the overall dislike may be caused by just one bad attribute, or even a set of normally liked attributes that just do not go well together, so positive aspects come to mind more easily.

"This difference leads us to make more exaggerated predictions that people like the same things we do, compared to predictions that people will dislike the same things that we dislike," Gershoff said.

Buying habits has changed last time.

"Where people shop for giftware has changed dramatically in the five years. The most notable change is how often shoppers are turning to the Internet to make purchases of these goods. In 2007 the Internet was the second most important venue

for giftware shopping, trailing only discount department stores." Danziger and her fellow-workers worked out an report titled The Ultimate Guide to the Gifts and Home Decorative Accents Consumer Market... Unfortunately, an access to this report is paid.

What is more Danziger (2004) claim that :

• Gift giving is about emotionally connecting giver and recipient

• Emotional shopping – the goal is to achieve a special feeling

• The gift communicates a message

• Problems can occur when the giver’s and the recipient’s value drivers differ

To sum up, we should not forget that every single gift is a proof of our attachment to gifted person. The most important is a fact of giving, not a value of a present. Gershoff said. "There are other values that people have and those values include building closer ties and closer friendships.

Heuristic and nostalgia in advertising...

Have you ever thought how it is possible that you buy one product instead of another? Maybe you not, but marketing and advertising specialist know a lot about this topic. They divided products into five categories from low involvement to high involvement products. Low involvement products are necessary for us to live, we buy it everyday without thinking about price (because these are usually cheap) or a brand (because these are usually not exist) e.g. bread. High involvement are products bought once for a whole life or only a few times during our life. Before making a choice we must find out more about brand, quality or a price of a product e.g. car or house. The process strongly related to our buying habits is called heuristic. According to what is.com The term seems to have two usages:

1) Describing an approach to learning by trying without necessarily having an organized hypothesis or way of proving that the results proved or disproved the hypothesis. That is, "seat-of-the-pants" or "trial-by-error" learning.

2) Pertaining to the use of the general knowledge gained by experience, sometimes expressed as "using a rule-of-thumb." (However, heuristic knowledge can be applied to complex as well as simple everyday problems. Human chess players use a heuristic approach.)

Another theory related to heuristic is a Fast and Frugal Heuristics, delevoped by Goldsetin and Gigerenzer (2004). They claim that:

Fast and frugal heuristics are rules of thumb for decision making that are:

1. ecologically rational (that is, they exploit structures of information in the environment)
2. founded in evolved psychological capacities such as memory and the perceptual system
3. fast, frugal, and simple enough to operate effectively when time, knowledge, and computational might are limited
4. precise enough to be modeled computationally
5. powerful enough to model both good and poor reasoning.

More information can be found in Simple Heuritics which make us Smart by Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M. Todd & the ABC Research Group.

Nostalgia

Everyone of us knows that advertising’s specialists manipulate our brains everyday. One of their tricks is using nostalgia that is bringing back our memories and associations from the past. As it is said in Sterns book (1992) nostalgic thoughts may be generated from either a personally remembered past (personal nostalgia) or from a time in history before one was born (historical/communal nostalgia). Advertising specialists affect on all our senses: smell, sight, taste, hearing and touch. One of the best existed example of nostalgia in ads is Coca Cola Christmas advert, it is known all around the world and it has not been changed for years. People can associate this advert with wonderful time during Christmas. The result of this advert is obvious, people buy coca-cola (and many other products with similar ads) in bigger amount of bottles, not because of its taste but because of good memories related to Christmas atmosphere.

I also found a very interesting but very long and detailed article about Using Nostalgia in Advertising.

Charity advertising and differences between genders....

Differences between genders are not difficult to recognize. It is obvious that we look different and our brains work in other ways. Women pay attention for details, however men for general idea. It has a big impact on our behaviour and it is important for advertising agencies workers whose aim is to grab our attention. The same situation is with charity advertising. It is even more difficult to create advert which is easy to remember and which not disappear in modern media such as TV and magazines. Everyone knows that it is much more difficult to persuade people spend their money when they do not get a bought product. The article explains the process of changes in charity advertising

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2001/mar/14/charities

That’s why charity advertising are often based on people’s emotions and threats. Recipients want to help because they afraid that similar situation can happen to them. According to

http://www.asa.org.uk/asa/codes/radio_code/Radio+Code+Charity+Advertising.htm

website:

Advertisements for charities must:

a) handle with care and discretion matters likely to arouse strong emotions in the audience;

b) not suggest that anyone will lack proper feeling or fail in any responsibility through not supporting a charity;

c) respect the dignity of those on whose behalf an appeal is being made;

d) not address any fundraising message specifically to children;

e) not contain comparisons with other charities;

f) avoid presenting an exaggerated impression of the scale or nature of the social problem to which the work of the charity is addressed, eg. by illustrating the message with non-typical extreme examples;

g) not misrepresent or mislead in any way about the charity, its field of activity or the use to which donations will be put.

Unfortunately, there are a few cases when this rules were not obeyed. At

http://www.charitytimes.com/

website we can find a few examples of such controversial charity campaigns:

2002: British Heart Foundation’s “plastic bag” press ads caused concern for children’s safety, attracting 315 complaints – the most that year. The complaints were upheld.

Unison failed to substantiate the implication in its advert that care home places had been lost due to the greed of private sector operators. Complaints by 140 people and businesses were upheld.

2003: Barnardo’s’ “silver spoons” press campaign in depicting babies with cockroaches or syringes in their mouths attracted 475 complaints. Complaints that the ads were offensive were upheld.

2004: British Heart Foundation’s “fatty cigarette” TV adverts in which fat spilled out of cigarettes, signifying the damage smoking does to arteries attracted 92 complaints, but Ofcom (which regulated television advertising at the time) decided the importance of the message outweighed the objections. Not upheld. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ef3gofQcOKk

Coming back to differences between genders. Schiebe and Condry (1984) were very interested in that topic. They examined advertisements according to product type and found major gender differences in the values promoted in advertisements. What was the result of their examination?

For women:

• ads often are more detailed. e.g. toiletry ads.
• women appreciate very fine distinctions, such as 5 different variations of shampoo-for curly hair, straight hair, oily hair, dry hair, etc.

For men:

• Toiletry ads focus on a single product.
• Men are likely to pick up on one or two very salient and obvious kinds of cues. (Free)
• Men think in a more macro way, and need to be shown the big picture.
• Men are less likely to process complex metaphors.

Examples (what is interesting, these are ads produced by the same company. First one is for females second one is for males.) Can you see the difference?