How would you feel if someone gave you a gym membership as a holiday or Valentine’s Day gift?
What about Botox?
Laser hair removal?
Services like those are part of the estimated US$48 billion self-improvement industry. Does this suggest that many people would appreciate self-improvement gifts?
Retailers seem to think so.
The Planet Fitness chain of gyms encourages buying workout equipment for Mother’s Day. The Republic of Tea offers beauty tea, which the company says can improve your complexion, as part of their gift sets. Instagram posts call paying for other people’s Botox treatments “the new flowers,” and tell men that it is what women want for Valentine’s Day.
As an academic who studies consumer behavior, I am particularly interested in social aspects of consumption. Seeing these promotions, I wondered whether consumers take the bait. In other words, do people really give self-improvement products as presents?
Different responses to different gifts
To study what happens when people get self-improvement goods or services as presents, I teamed up with Farnoush Reshadi, a fellow marketing scholar with expertise in both self-improvement and gift-giving.
First we asked 97 adults living in the United States whether they had ever gotten a self-improvement product as a gift. About 60% of these consumers, whom we recruited through an online platform, were women and they were 38.6 years old on average. Two-thirds of them indicated that they had received a self-improvement gift at some point.
Next, we created an experiment to find out how consumers might feel when they receive these gifts.
In it, 209 people imagined that they had received either a self-improvement calendar geared toward sharpening their communication skills or a “did you know” calendar with fun facts, such as bananas are berries.
Participants viewed the calendars, then answered some questions about how they would feel if someone gave them one.
Specifically, we asked to what extent they would feel hurt, wounded and crushed. On average, the people who saw the self-improvement calendar expressed stronger hurt feelings than those who saw the fun facts one.
What can happen to retailers
We also wanted to know how the people who receive self-improvement gifts might cope with their hurt feelings.
Explaining how they felt to the gift-giver seems unlikely, since social norms dictate that you should feel grateful for presents. Expressing other kinds of feelings about gifts, including hurt feelings, is relatively taboo.
Another possibility is that people in this situation cope by venting – either to someone else or by giving the gift a bad review.
This is exactly what we found.
Compared to those who imagined receiving gifts not geared toward self-improvement, people who imagined receiving self-improvement items as gifts consistently said they would give them lower ratings. They also said they were more likely to criticize them.
To be clear, this had nothing to do with the quality of those items.
To verify that, we asked 205 people to imagine either buying the self-improvement calendar or the “did you know?” calendar for themselves. Then, we asked them to rate the calendar. On average, participants gave both the self-improvement calendar and the other calendar about 3.7 out of 5 stars.
This helped us rule out the possibility that people generally disliked the self-improvement calendar or thought it was a bad product.
Isa Foltin/Getty Images
Bad reviews are bad for business
Spreading negative word of mouth about self-improvement gifts might help people deal with their hurt feelings. But, to state the obvious, it doesn’t help retailers.
Negative product reviews can affect retailers’ revenue and reputations. That means self-improvement gifts don’t just hurt the people receiving them. By stimulating negative word of mouth, they hurt the retailers selling them, too.
To discourage bad reviews from people who get unwelcome gifts, we would suggest that companies not promote self-improvement products as gifts.
Instead, retailers could encourage consumers to buy those goods and services for themselves. This might be especially effective in January, when many people challenge themselves to meet self-improvement goals with New Year’s resolutions. This strategy might work throughout the year, as well.
To deter people from buying these gifts, retailers could refrain from marketing such goods and services that way or putting them on sale before Valentine’s Day and other gift-giving occasions.
Even if retailers were to follow this advice, some of their customers might buy these gifts. What can retailers do then?
2 work-arounds
Our research identified two potential solutions.
First, retailers can offer financial incentives for leaving product reviews.
We conducted a study in which 311 people imagined receiving either a weight-loss tea or a regular tea as a birthday present. Some of the participants also imagined that they would be given a Visa gift card in exchange for leaving a review of the product.
On average, people gave the weight-loss tea a lower rating than the regular tea – unless they had been offered a Visa gift card in exchange for their review. Participants who imagined receiving a weight-loss tea along with a Visa gift card provided ratings that were comparable to those who received a regular tea.
Second, retailers can take care with how they send review requests.
Sometimes these requests aren’t framed as being from anyone in particular. Other times, they’re framed as though a real person sent them, along these lines: “Please review this product. Thanks, Alex.”
We had 306 people imagine receiving a weight-loss tea or a regular tea, accompanied by a review request. Participants then rated the imagined product. On average, the weight-loss tea got lower ratings than the regular tea – unless they received a review request that apparently came from a human.
This suggests that sending review requests that appear to be from a specific person might help retailers avoid negative product reviews from people who get self-improvement products as presents.
This is a good thing, because self-improvement gifts aren’t necessarily bad goods or services. They’re just bad gifts.
So, the next time you shop for presents, my advice is that you skip the self-improvement aisle. Your friend or loved one – and the business you might have bought it from – will be glad you did.