Gifting experiences, not things, builds closer connections
My son and I share a nerdy fondness for the NPR game show, “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” Every weekend we try to find the time to listen to Peter Sagal and his rotating panel of comedians as they make quips about current events and gleefully revel in clever puns. So when his birthday rolled around last year, instead of buying the latest gadget coveted by kids his age I got us tickets to the Wait Wait Stand-Up Tour. 
What I didn’t know at the time was that the live show would be vastly different from what we hear on NPR. The comedians were familiar, but the material wasn’t; there were more swear words than witty wordplay getting delivered from the stage, and the subject matter was decidedly more mature. It was funny, to be sure, but inwardly I was cringing. This experience wasn’t going to be the memorable gift I had planned, I thought.
I was mistaken … again. Although the show wasn’t what we expected, my son still cites that outing as one of his all-time favorite moments with me. The other material gifts that he received from me are still getting some use a year later, but as it turns out, even an experience-gone-wrong bestows a more lasting positive impact.
As we settle into fall and start thinking about the upcoming holidays — and the vacuous labor of holiday shopping — consider the benefits of gifting experiences, like a cooking class, a show or a mani-pedi, rather than gifting “stuff.”
The Benefits of Gifting Experiences
What was revelatory to me — that gifting experiences could carry so many benefits — is actually a familiar phenomenon to experts in the consumerism field. A 2016 study in the Journal of Consumer Research found that experiential gifts foster stronger relationships than material gifts.
“Experiments examining actual gift exchanges in real-life relationships reveal that experiential gifts produce greater improvements in relationship strength than material gifts, regardless of whether the gift-giver and recipient consume the gift together,” the study authors, Cindy Chan, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, and Cassie Mogilner, an associate professor at UCLA, noted. “The relationship improvements that recipients derive from experiential gifts stem from the intensity of emotion that is evoked when they consume the gifts, rather than when the gifts are received.”
In other words, experiential gifts carry significantly more emotional weight, and foster a closer connection between the recipient and gift-giver. We spoke with consumer behavior scholar Beth DuFault, assistant professor of marketing at Pamplin School of Business at University of Portland, to dive a little deeper.
“One of the reasons we exchange gifts is to cultivate personal relationships,” says DuFault. “And everything around the gift exchange, like the context, the meanings of things, the emotions, they lead to different relational outcomes.”
What researchers have found, DuFault explains, is that there is essentially a personal baseline of emotions you might experience when you receive a gift; you will feel roughly the same intensity of emotion regardless of whether the gift is material or experiential. But with experiential gifts, you will go on to create memories and attach stronger emotions to the experience itself, and therefore feel more closely connected with the gift-giver.
One of the key things for DuFault, when it comes to gift giving, is how this strengthening of relationships works. “Material things can be experienced and trigger memories, for sure. But they often don’t lead to the rich narrative-building that experiences do,” DuFault says. “When people have an experience, it becomes part of their identity construction. And our identities are narrative-based. So when you do the experience, and when you remember the experience later on, you are reliving the emotions, which is the thing that strengthened the relationship in the first place.”
Why Isn’t Experience-gifting More Common?
The vast majority of gifts that people give are material gifts, says Hillary Wiener, assistant professor of marketing at the Massry School of Business at the University at Albany, adding, “They feel like a safer option.”
“The research basically shows that people are less certain [of success] when it comes to experiential gifts,” she says, “and they are very concerned about giving something that the person will not really like.”
One of the biggest concerns when it comes to experiential gifts is cost. You can give someone a trinket, for example, and if they don’t like it, the financial and emotional toll is relatively low. But experiences can cost more money (in general), and when you add the emotional aspect, the risk becomes much greater.
Keep in mind, Wiener says, that the concern over whether the recipient will like the experience is probably overwrought. “If you’re trying to think about it through the lens of, ‘well, I want to give them an experience but I’m not sure what it should be,’ know that [the recipient] might have a kind of default liking for the experience, even if it’s not necessarily the perfect thing, just because it is an experience rather than an item.” They may not get regular pedicures, for example, but might enjoy getting one as a gift because you gave it to them — or better yet, because you’re going along with them.
Additionally, even if the experience itself goes wrong, that doesn’t mean it won’t strengthen your relationship. DuFault fondly recalls a personal experience from years ago, when her first husband gifted her a ski trip. He was an avid skier, but she was new to the sport. In a scene right out of a romantic comedy, DuFault got stuck on the chairlift and had to get rescued by attendants to get down. “And I laughed so hard, and we just laughed so hard skiing down the hill, we fell into snow banks,” she recalls. “This was a huge relationship strengthening event at the time.”
Of course, the success of any experience depends on your shared interactions and perceptions. If one person is enjoying it and the other isn’t, that’s going to be an issue. But as long as the gift-giver is sensitive to the gift recipient’s emotional responses, any experience can have a positive impact … even bringing a preteen to an adult comedy show.
Top image source: iStockphoto.com/Nastco
