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Gift or Gift Card? Symbolic Interactionism in Gift Exchange

2014; Springer International Publishing; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-319-10873-5_13

2363-6165

Caroline Graham Austin, Lei Huang,

Customer Service Quality and Loyalty

Most current research that exists on gift card use addresses their risks for consumers and retailers (e.g., Horne 2007a, Horne 2007b), although recent work by Tuten and Kiecker (2009) greatly expands our understanding of how teenage consumers value gift cards on both practical and emotional levels. In light of the absence of research on this topic overall, we expanded the preliminary scope of our inquiry to include three fundamental questions related to gift card giving: 1) Who buys gift cards? 2) For whom are gift cards purchased? 3) When giving a gift card as a gift, what are the reasons that people choose to give a gift card as opposed to a specific item? We specifically focus on the ambivalence that consumers feel when they both give and receive gift cards, given that the monetary value of a gift card is an explicitly indicated amount, and that they are less personal than other types of gifts. We used a multi-method research approach, combing survey and focus group data to examine our conceptual model of the gift-card decision-making process.