Mother's Day Consumer Electronics Buying

A pitch letter was written on May 11th on Tony Gao's thoughts on consumer electronics buying for Mother's Day. Tony Gao, a marketing professor at Northeastern University's College of Business Administration is a retail expert.

Two Recent Trends in US Gift Buying
In my view, when it comes to gift giving in the US in recent years, for mothers and all others, we have witnessed two emerging phenomena that I call the miniaturization and intangiblization of gifts.

By miniaturization, I mean smaller size, higher technology content, and more complex functionality, as the term is often used in the technology sector. Mother’s day gifts have traditionally tended to be small, considering jewelry, greeting cards, books, and flowers. But today’s popular gifts for Mom, such as GPS devices for the car, MP3/iPod players, and digital album frames, are much more technologically advanced and serve more complex functions.

By intangiblization, I mean our inability to view the final form of the gift at the time of gift presentation. What’s inside a beautifully wrapped gift box may very well be a small (again miniaturized) gift card of a certain cash amount, no matter how colorful, exotic, and contextually suitable it is. The advent of gift cards has enabled consumers to purchase and present as gifts intangible consumption experiences (for example, a fine dinning experience or spa treatment) rather than tangible goods. Another benefit of gift cards is personal control - it allows the gift recipient to purchase something s/he really needs and wants at a convenient setting. Over time, however, with the intangiblization of gifts may come the fading of an important ritual of American gift giving – the showing of “wow” expressions with the opening of the gift box. What would you say when you see a $100 gift card from Best Buy?

Unchanging Motivations of Gift Buying
Yet, the miniaturization and intangiblization of gifts do not in any way connote the marginalization of gift-giving in the American society. Rather, what is bought is simply changing with the time. The fundamental and often irreplaceable role of gifts as a way to convey love, gratitude, care, and loyalty remains the same.

Generally, consumers are buying holiday gifts today for the same reasons they did 20 years ago, to look for good value, or a good combination of benefits (what we get) and costs (what we give out). Gifts bought to commemorate a holiday may provide several types of benefits to both the gift buyer and recipient:

Situational (in the case of Mother’s Day, it’s for the special day once a year in honor of the mother for all her love, dedication, and sacrifice),
Social (to show care, love, and gratitude to Mom),
Psychological (to give Mom a feeling of recognition and worth),
Functional (to serve an important functional role in Mom daily life such as a cell phone or a GPS in the car),
Epistemic (to allow Mom to experience some new technology such as a digital camera or an iPod),
Hedonic (to give Mom an exotic experience of a mountain get-away or a spa treatment), and
Aesthetic (for Mom’s use of the gift as a fashion statement).

Gift buyers are pursuing these same benefits from year to year but what items offer the best combination of benefits does change by the year. While often costing more to purchase, the technologically enhanced Mother’s Day’s gifts usually offer more total benefits than does, say, a bundle of flowers, a book, or a collectible figurine. In other words, gifts such as consumer electronics may offer several of the above gifts all at once.

Therefore, from a value perspective, the gift buyer is spending more to assemble a larger package of total benefits for Mom. Not only do the more benefits well justify the higher cost, the higher price itself conveys a feeling of added appreciation for Mom’s care and contributions.

One more reason that explains the rising trend to send personal electronics products to mothers is in the demographic of the dominant buyer of Mother’s Day gifts. The children who buy most Mother’s Day gifts, 18-20 year-olds, are tech savvy themselves.

We will expect to see similar happenings to Father’s Day gift shopping."
Below is Professor Gao's bio:

Professor Gao received a Ph.D. in marketing from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, an M.E. in business management from Harbin Institute of Technology (Harbin, China), and a B.E. in industrial and management engineering from Hebei University of Technology (Tianjin, China). Previously, he held faculty positions at Washburn University, Hofstra University, College of William and Mary, and Hebei University of Technology (China). He also worked with the China branch of Mitsubishi Corporation (a general trading company in Japan) in the areas of international trade and joint venture developments. Professor Gao conducts research primarily on the development, governance, and consequences of buyer-seller relationships, customer value and risk perceptions, international business strategies, and business ethics. He has published in Journal of Business Research, Journal of Business Ethics, Research in Marketing, International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research, Journal of Relationship Marketing, Journal of International Business and Economy, Latin American Business Review, and Multinational Business Review. For his dissertation work on industrial buyer-seller relationships, he was a former winner of the National Association of Purchasing Management (now Institute for Supply Management) Doctoral Dissertation Competition.