How to Wrap Your Gifts

Gifts play a role in winning your loved one’s heart. So are the gift wrappings. But when it’s come to gift wrapping, the discoveries tell a different story. Consumers spend lots of money on gift wraps- paper, boxes, ribbons, and pretty bows. While some individuals are good at wrapping a gift with perfect folds, carefully tied ribbons, and bows, others are not good at the job.

Eric M Mas and two of his colleagues experimented to find whether the time we spend on wrapping gifts is worth or not. Do people like beautifully wrapped gifts, or it’s the other way around?

They recruited 180 university students at a behavioral lab to perform the experiment disguised as an extra credit exercise. Upon arrival, they were given coffee mugs as a token of appreciation. Half of the students got coffee mugs with the logo of the home basketball team, very popular among them as it’s their home team.  And the other half of the students got the coffee mug with the logo of the rival basketball team that was not popular at all. The purpose behind that segregation is to offer half of the students’ desirable gifts, and the other half received something they did not desire.

Now come to the gift wrapping part. Half of the coffee mugs had a neat wrap, and the rest looks slapdash. After unwrapping, the participants evaluated how much they liked their gifts. The researcher found that those who received sloppily wrapped gifts preferred their present significantly more than those who received neatly wrapped gifts.

To understand the reason, they received another set of students and told them to imagine an item inside neatly and sloppily wrapped gifts. All of them received the same thing- a pair of JVC earbuds.

Results showed that expectations were significantly higher for the neatly wrapped gifts compared to sloppily wrapped ones. When asked, the individuals who received neatly wrapped gifts hold that it failed to live up to their expectations. On the other hand, the recipients of the sloppily packed items said the JVC earbuds surpassed their expectations. It suggests that people compare wrappings to how good the gift will be. Neat wrappings imitate that it will be a great present. Sloppy wrappings, on the other hand, set low expectations, suggesting it will be a not so good gift.

In their third and final experiment, they wanted to check whether the relationship between gift-giver and recipient changes with the type of wrapping. They surveyed 261 adults, and half of them told to imagine a gift from a close friend, and half of them instructed to believe it comes from an acquaintance. 

(Image Source: pxhere)

When it came from a close friend, recipients ended up liking sloppily wrapped gifts more, and when gifts come from an acquaintance, recipients preferred when it was neatly packed. It was the case when recipients considered the wrapping as a hint of how much the gift-giver values their relationship. Neat wrapping implies the giver values their relationship.

So from next time, mind the wrappings.

(Source article: https://bit.ly/3igADq0)