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Social media take over as top gift-finding resource

If you’re planning on buying a gift without the help of social media, then you’re stuck in 2014.

The gift-giving world has changed, and technology is dominating the way people research gifts.

The biggest change is the percentage of consumers who use social media to research the perfect gift, said Jonathan Pirc, founder and vice president of product for Lab42, a quantitative market research firm that helps businesses accomplish their goals through targeted social media-based research.

According to their December study, 30 percent of people researched gifts on social media in 2013, and that number jumped to 37 percent last year, with shoppers using product recommendations on their social networks to spot and buy gifts.

“I believe that in the next few years, there will be an even larger percentage of people who are doing their gift researching online and through social networks,” Pirc said. “With the vast amount of information that people post online, it makes it easier for the person giving the gift to find the perfect niche present for the giftee.”

In fact, social media ranked just behind website research, walking through stores and asking friends and family, Pirc said.

The most popular social network for gift researching was Facebook.

Beyond social media, according to the Lab42 study, consumers research gifts via retail websites, walking through stores, asking friends or family and looking through catalogs.

When they’re researching gifts, consumers tend to look at the rating of the products more than the wording in the description, said Marshal Cohen, chief industry and retail analyst at The NPD Group, a market research company. Next, they look at the best price, including free shipping offers.

But researching gifts has changed from active to reactive, stemming from the number of invites and deal offers that are bombarding shoppers’ inboxes, he said.

“So now research is coming to the consumer nonstop,” Cohen said. “This allows them to be on the hunt to accept deals rather than to seek them out.”

Even with all that research, however, some still get it wrong.

A recent study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that gift recipients are more appreciative of gifts that they request than those that are a surprise.

“Givers tend to get gifts that are personalized but less versatile than recipients prefer to receive,” said Mary Steffel, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Cincinnati, who did a study on gifts published in the Journal of Consumer Research. “This is because givers tend to focus on recipients’ stable traits and choose gifts reflecting those traits,” she said.

Instead, she suggests that givers should focus on what the recipient would like instead of what they are like as a person.

“Givers in our experiments who did this were more likely to choose the more versatile gifts that recipients prefer,” Steffel said.

A gift that’s considered to be a good gift is one that’s practical, said Ernest Baskin, a doctoral candidate in marketing at the Yale School of Management, who did a study on the topic.

First, he said, givers should identify the category that the receiver likes, such as Italian food. Choosing that category makes the gift personalized. Then, they could make the gift practical by choosing an Italian restaurant with pretty good food that’s five minutes away rather than one that has excellent food but is an hour away.

“One way of doing it is to gut-check whether the gift is something they themselves would want at the end,” he said.