Why friends like sloppily wrapped gifts

DURING A GAP year in England in 2002, Jessica Rixom earned extra pocket money gift-wrapping sweets at Thorntons, a British chocolate-maker. When she returned home to America, she wondered if her knack for wrapping would score her points with friends and family. In fact, it may have done the opposite. A recent paper by Ms Rixom, now a professor of marketing at the University of Nevada, Reno, concludes that slick parcel-packing can actually be a turn-off.

The finding defies conventional wisdom. Previous research has shown that wrapping paper summons happy memories, making recipients more fond of their gifts. Yet, according to Ms Rixom and her co-authors, Brett Rixom and Erick Mas of Vanderbilt University, such positive feelings may materialise only when giving gifts to people we do not know all that well.

With acquaintances, they argue, effort put into wrapping is taken as a signal of the value of the relationship, making the gift more meaningful. With friends, the opposite is true. In an established relationship, wrapping paper sends a signal about the value of the gift itself. A neat package raises expectations, which then become harder to meet.

The authors recruited 261 adults from Mechanical Turk, an outsourcing platform, for an experiment. Subjects were asked to imagine being at a party with a gift exchange. They were presented with images of neatly and sloppily wrapped gifts and asked to rate their feelings from one (for displeased) to nine (for delighted). Ms Rixom and her colleagues found that, when received from an acquaintance, neatly wrapped gifts received higher scores, on average, than sloppily wrapped ones (6.7 v 3.8, respectively). Coming from a friend, however, sloppy parcels were rated higher than tidy ones (6.5 v 4.4).

Holiday gift-givers should consider the nature of their relationship with recipients when prepping presents, says Ms Rixom. “It’s about taking a step back and asking who are you wrapping this gift for: a friend, or just an acquaintance?” Firms like IG Design Group plc, the world’s biggest producer of wrapping paper, may want to keep this new finding under wraps. Each year Britons tear through an estimated 365,0000 kilometres of festive wrapping during the holidays. Americans spend a whopping $2.6bn on the stuff.

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