In this op-ed, Thinkerbell behavioural sciences thinker Madison Ross explores whether framing makes a difference in advertising the agency’s Bachelor’s Handbag.
One of the many tactical levers marketers can pull when positioning a product is shifting who the purchase is intended for.
When a product leans into novelty or indulgence, reframing a purchase as a gift for someone else is a popular marketing tactic. The thinking is straightforward, people often hesitate to spend money on purely fun or non-essential purchases for themselves because they can feel difficult to justify (Kivetz & Simonson, 2002). Reframing that exact same item as a gift for a mate helps wipe that guilt away by shifting the focus away from self-indulgence and towards making someone else happy.
So for this month’s Weirdo Science experiment, we set out to test whether framing a novelty product as a gift would increase conversion over telling people to treat themselves.
As it turns out, the experiment didn’t give us the clear winner we predicted.
The Experiment
We created two ads for The Bachelor’s Handbag, a real handbag designed to look like a roast chicken bag (born out of Thinkerbell’s Pot of Gold initiative in collaboration with Size 11, which you can check out at bachelorshandbag.com).
Both ads featured the same product, messenger and setting and ran on Meta under the same budget. The only variable we played with was the framing in the script:
Ad 1: Gift for self
Ad 2: Gift for mate
The Results
Across both ads, total conversions were low which left us with a small sample to analyze.
The “gift for self” ad delivered slightly more adds-to-cart at a lower cost per result ($16.44 vs $23.27). It also generated a higher reach (3,484 vs. 2,784) and delivered more impressions (4,297 vs. 3,721), suggesting Meta was able to distribute that creative slightly more efficiently.
Demographics were similar across both campaigns, with men accounting for most add-to-carts. However, with only ten add-to-carts in total, the difference between the two ads was not statistically significant, meaning we cannot conclude that either framing genuinely outperformed the other. Changing the angle from self-indulgence to gifting had no meaningful impact on conversion.
Why Might This Be Happening?
So why didn’t gift framing outperform self-indulgence?
One possibility is that two different psychological forces were working against each other.
Research shows that people often experience a degree of guilt when considering purely hedonic purchases, which is why marketers frequently try to provide a justification for buying them (Kivetz & Simonson, 2002). Giving the product as a gift is one justification but so is treating yourself. Research on self-gifting shows people regularly buy themselves small indulgences as rewards, celebrations or simply to lift their mood (Mick & DeMoss, 1990). Marketing that frames a purchase as a deserved reward grants explicit permission to indulge, reducing the guilt without an external excuse.
At the same time, buying for someone else introduces a different consideration: social risk. When we’re shopping for ourselves, we’re mostly considering whether we would actually use this. When we’re shopping for someone else, we’re thinking more about how great the idea sounds. A novelty handbag designed to look like a roast chicken bag might sound funny in theory, but it also comes with the risk that your mate won’t appreciate the joke. Previous research has shown that gift givers often think differently about products than gift receivers, with social considerations becoming a much bigger part of the decision (Baskin et al., 2014).
Beyond the psychology, there is also a practical execution factor to consider as to how people actually consume video in feed. Research by Verizon Media and Publicis Media shows that up to 69% of mobile video is watched with the sound off (McCue, 2019). When an A/B test relies on spoken dialogue to test a copy change, a large portion of the audience may be scrolling past silently without ever hearing the difference. Unless the visual execution or on-screen captions explicitly highlight the shift, script-level changes can easily get lost in feed.
What This Means For Marketers
This experiment’s findings doesn’t mean gift messaging doesn’t work or that people prefer buying roast chicken handbags for themselves.
What it does suggest is that changing who a purchase is intended for isn’t necessarily enough on its own to shift conversion
We didn’t find a definitive answer on whether a self-indulgence or gifting message is more effective for The Bachelor’s Handbag. However, exploring how recipient framing shapes consumer choices remains an interesting area for future creative testing.
References
Baskin, E., Wakslak, C. J., Trope, Y., & Novemsky, N. (2014). Why feasibility matters more to gift receivers than to givers: A construal-level approach to gift giving. Journal of Consumer Research, 41(1), 169-182.
Kivetz, R., & Simonson, I. (2002). Self-control for the righteous: Toward a theory of precommitment to indulgence. Journal of consumer research, 29(2), 199-217.
Mick, D. G., & DeMoss, M. (1990). Self-gifts: Phenomenological insights from four contexts. Journal of Consumer Research, 17(3), 322-332.
McCue, T. J. (2019). Verizon media says 69 percent of consumers watching video with sound off.
