Politics may influence gift choices more than they influence personal purchases

Political affiliation may not influence an individual’s everyday purchases, but it can influence the purchases they make for friends, family, and colleagues, new research from the University of New Hampshire shows. It turns out. This may impact gift purchases this holiday season and beyond.

The study is published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing.

“We conducted five different studies, each looking at purchasing a different product, and asked people to make a choice for themselves versus a gift for someone they know. “We found that politics plays a bigger role when people buy gifts,” says Peter T. Paul of UNH Business Economics. said Justin Pomerance, assistant professor of marketing at the university and lead author.

In their paper, Pomerance and his co-author Lief van Boven, a psychology professor at the University of Colorado, showed that political party plays a bigger role than the type of product.

In a series of five studies, we asked online participants and college students a series of purchasing questions. In the first study, participants were asked to create music playlists for themselves and others. If you were self-selected, only 58% of songs were by artists that aligned with your political ideology. But when they created a playlist for someone else, that number increased to 64% of songs that matched their target’s political leanings.

A similar pattern emerged when participants selected paintings for others, preferring politically aligned art for others rather than for themselves.

In a series of studies, choices ranged from choosing a song or a painting to predicting how much others would enjoy experiences rather than material things. Both focused on how political cues, such as product labeling or the political views of a particular artist, influence consumers’ preferences when purchasing for others.

Similar patterns emerged across studies, with participants consistently placing more importance on how interested others were in politics, even in studies where product information was ambiguous. Despite the blurry image of the painting, 61% of participants chose politically aligned items for others, compared to only 54% for themselves.

To take it a step further, researchers also compared political cues to other identity indicators, such as gender and race, to determine whether major donors to museums are conservative or liberal, or whether they identify as a gender or minority group. Participants were told whether they were identified by status. The results revealed that political cues had a stronger influence on participants’ perceptions than gender or race.

“There are several reasons for this,” Pomerance says. “First, it seems more socially acceptable to like or dislike someone based on their politics than their race or gender. Political identity feels like a choice, a personal It reflects your preferences more.”

The researchers say these findings provide further evidence for previous research and have important implications for companies. Because while companies may believe that taking a political position or sending a political signal has a significant impact on customers’ purchasing decisions, research suggests this is not the case. be. However, because people often buy for others, such as colleagues, friends, family, and people in their communities, understanding consumer decisions is important.

They believe this study could offer a sign of hope. It shows that while polarization may dominate political discussions, most people don’t always think about it when making consumer decisions.