Opening Act
Imagine giving a friend a birthday present. Instead of opening it right then and there, she gratefully accepts it and then runs off excitedly to another room to open it in private. Did she like it? Did she use it? Weeks pass and she gives you no indication either way. You’d be irked and rightly so! If only there were gift notifications to let you know when her gift was used.
This example is a laughable (and improbable) scene because it goes against the simplest etiquette of receiving a gift. Knowing how a gift was received is part of the experience of giving a gift. But isn’t that how most gift cards are used?
With gift cards, a gift is exchanged but the whole gift experience feels incomplete. The payoff for the excitement you feel in giving sort of falls flat.
The Whole Act of Giving
The psychology of gift giving goes a long way to explain that unfinished feeling. When you give a gift, there’s so much more going on besides an exchange of property. Giving involves the object exchanged and the total experience that both giver and receiver share in that exchange.
The experience of giving unfolds like a drama with many acts: leaving hints, searching for the gift, the presentation, the excitement at receiving the gift, the graceful acceptance, and the show of appreciation. C. Mayet and K. Pine describe the theatricality of gift giving as masterful performance of reciprocity where each person responds to the other—like two great improv comics feeding off each other’s energy.
The drama involves creativity and empathy in order to intuit the intentions of another person and respond in kind. Giving is an exercise in the social skills that make us good at relating to each other. We play the parts because we implicitly understand how important gifting is in fostering mutual interest.
Marcel Mauss describes in The Gift (1927) how gifts are perpetually linked to the giver (as explained on Sciencelens). It’s almost as if ownership of a gift is shared between the giver and receiver, which is why selling a gift is hard. Through shared ownership of something, two people effectively have shared interest in each other.
At its best, the total gifting experience forms a tight social bond that lasts well past the actual moment of exchange. That’s why behavioural economists suggest that a durable gift with high utility has the biggest social impact, because it makes multiple impressions over time.
Gift Cards — An unfinished act
Giving a conventional gift card is like having the curtain drop midway through the final act.
Gift cards are rarely (if ever) redeemed with the giver present. The giver is left to merely imagine the receiver enjoying the gift. The important last stage of the gift experience, where the giver gets to see the gift put to use, never happens. This last stage, which Mayet and Pine call the move from revelation to consumption, is a culmination of the previous stages. It makes real the potential value contained within the gift before it’s open. Without it, the experience is incomplete and the social potential inherent to giving squandered.
This gap between receiving the gift card and redeeming it disrupts the important social function of giving. The shared experience that link people together in the gift exchange goes unrealized. A degree of separation occurs between what the giver hands to the receiver and what the receiver redeems at the store. As the gift card wipes out the total at the checkout counter, the receiver feels like she’s getting something for free from the store. The goodwill present in the gift shifts from the giver to the retailer, and that fabulous something the receiver got when she redeemed the gift card isn’t linked with the giver anymore. It’s hard for people to transfer the emotions connected to a gift from the plastic card that changed hands to the thing of great value they end up with.
Kiind — Closing out the show and bringing down the house
Kiind has a simple, smart solution to this problem. Gift notifications.
Why Gift Notifications Finish the Gift Experience
Gift notifications affirm the giver. A notification is a simple way to let you know that you’re a good person who did something good for another person. It feels good—as it should!
Feedback is necessary for a gift exchange to have emotional resonance and foster mutual interest. Multiple studies, collected in Diana Rico article for Odewire and scrutinized by the Harvard Business School, show a strong correlation between giving and improved overall happiness and connectedness. It allows the giver to feel valuable and generous and part of the receiver’s life. It confirms that the receiver accepted the gift and understood the message it conveyed. Without feedback, a gift reduces to the thing changing hands and the whole giving experience is lost.
Gift notifications make giving with Kiind feel really smart. You get the advantage of a gift card—the receivers get the thing they really wanted—and you also get the social advantage of a gift that makes multiple impressions over time. The giver gets linked to something the receiver really wanted, giving rise to long-term positive association between two people.
For the Encore
“It’s the thought that counts.” It’s a well-worn adage bordering on the cliché, but when it comes to the social network effects of giving, thought is everything. The thoughtfulness of the gift is not the main thing that counts though. Rather, it’s how often the positive thoughts of the giver and receiver turn to the other. The total gifting experience is an extended ritual of reciprocal thought and goodwill directed at other people.
Giving is a wonderful way to generate positive thought. Powered by Kiind’s gift notifications, giving becomes effective at creating shared goodwill within a giver’s network. A simple change like notifications can turn gift cards from a gift that causes a deficit of thought to one that creates an abundance.
It’s like seeing your favorite actor in your favorite play and then getting treated to an hour-long encore. Kiind makes that possible.
There’s more to come, and we’re really excited to show you all the other things Kiind makes possible as we roll out our service.
