Welcome! In this gifting stats post we use the results of a survey conducted by GiftingWho to answer an extremely important question around gifting: What Gifts Do People Like Receiving The Most? According to our research, people like receiving experience gifts the most – so make sure you gift accordingly!
Table of Contents
Goal
Our goal is very simple: to help people find amazing gift ideas. In order to accomplish this, it is important to not randomly suggest gifts from the internet like a blind dart throwing contest, but to instead use a data-driven approach to pinpoint exactly what kinds of gifts people love the most. Bullseye! By exploring the science of gifting and answering important statistical questions, we can suggest the best possible gifts that are the most likely to be cherished and loved by the recipient.
In our previous gifting stats post, we answered the question of who people struggle finding gifts for the most. If you want to see the interesting results of that post, click here. In this post, we will be learning exactly what types of gifts people like receiving the most. According to BBC, you shouldn’t fret about price when it comes to gifting, so let’s figure out what you should be paying attention to. We will also be answering more specific questions such as what gifts do men and women like the most? And what gifts do people of different ages like the most?
Data
The data for this statistical analysis comes from a survey conducted by GiftingWho where we had 1,100 respondents answer a series of demographic and gift-related questions. These questions were:
- What type of gift do you like receiving the most?
- What is your gender?
- What is your age?
- What is your occupation?
- Do you have kids?
- What is important to you in a gift?
In this post, we will be taking a look at the results for the first question: “What type of gift do you like receiving the most?”
Data Exploration
The question of interest contains 7 possible categorical answers:
- Alcohol
- Clothing/Accessories
- Electronics
- Experience
- Home Decor
- Joke/Gag
- Toys/Games
The order of these answers was randomized for every user in order to reduce risk of bias, and the user was only allowed to select one answer.
Risk Of Bias
As with any survey, it is extremely important to expose any potential risk of biases (RoB). For more details on assessing RoB, see how Cochrane assesses RoB in individual medical studies here.
Since the survey answers themselves were randomized for every user, we can confidently say that there was no RoB within the survey itself.
As is often the case with surveys however, a RoB was present in the respondent demographics themselves. The survey was circulated across North America via social media and payed responses, but as seen in Figure 1, the majority of respondents were students (21.8%), with the next closest being sales (5.5%). The rest of the occupations were quite scattered. This bias is reflected in the fact that 52% of the respondents were between ages 19-34. The majority of respondents were also male (70%).
Moreover, because many of the responses were gathered through social media, a large portion of the respondents will be from my hometown, Vancouver, which is a relatively high income city.
The last risk of bias comes from the external factor of COVID-19. The virus is currently forcing the majority of people to stay at home which may put them in a slightly different state of mind than is generally the case. With these caveats in mind, let’s take a look at the results!
What Does The Data Tell Us?
Let’s take a look at the results and finally answer our burning question: What gifts do people like receiving the most? We can answer this question and more by examining how both gender and age affect the responses.
What Gifts Do People Like Receiving The Most?
Figure 2 shows the respondent’s favorite type of gift to receive. Perhaps surprisingly, the vast majority of people like receiving experience gifts the most (44.5%). The next most frequent type of gift people like receiving is clothing/accessories (20.9%), followed by Electronics (12.7%).
I was quite surprised that experience gifts were so highly rated by the respondents. Experience gifts are generally quite unique, and generally entail spending fun quality time with someone else. Perhaps because of the circumstances around COVID-19, people are really craving getting out of the house and spending quality time with friends doing fun activities. Regardless, we will be putting together some awesome experience gift recommendations in the near future!
This visualization is interesting, but it doesn’t quite tell the entire story. As was mentioned in the risk of bias section, the majority of respondents were young (19-35 years old), and the majority were male (70%). This can skew the results towards that demographics’ answers, and so it is important to get a lower-level view to capture more useful statistics.
How Does Gender Affect The Results?
The first way we can split the data is by gender. What gifts do women like to receive the most? What gifts do men like to receive the most? We will answer those questions here. Figure 3 shows the survey results split between the two genders. This visualization gives us a little more information than the previous figure, and can help us answer the following two important questions.
What Gifts Do Women Like?
According to these results, women like receiving experience gifts the most (52.8%) followed by clothing/accessories (27.9%) and home decor (12.4%). It is also important to note that women do not care much for joke/gag gifts. Noted!
What Gifts Do Men Like?
Men like receiving experience gifts the most (41%) followed by clothing/accessories (18%) and electronics (16.7%). Men don’t seem to care much for home decor gifts, and like receiving alcohol as a gift almost twice as much as women do.
How Does Age Affect The Results?
The other way we can split the data is by age. Having categories such as toys/games so high for men could be misleading, as the majority of boys in the 13-18 age range are probably choosing this category, whereas the rest of the older men might not care about it. Figure 4 shows the survey results split into the various age groups. As was expected, respondents in the 13-18 year age range like getting toys/games, joke/gag, and electronics gifts the most (28.5% each).
Aside from this young age range, there are some interesting trends in the data. Intuitively, people want toys/games as gifts less and less as they get older. Also, people want clothing/accessories more and more as they get older, except for in the age range of 35-44 years. This is perhaps explained by the fact that 35-44 years is generally when people are buying and decorating houses, and as can be seen in the home decor category, this particular age range wants home decor gifts much more compared to other ages (28.8%). This does not necessarily mean this age group hates clothing/accessories, but instead means that they would rather receive home decor gifts at this age. Interesting!
Some other interesting results are that people in the age range of 45-54 years have quite a large interest in receiving alcohol as a gift (24.3%). Perhaps they have finally finished decorating their house and are now interested in stocking their home bars (or maybe they need to reduce the stress caused by kids..)!
The last quick note that you may notice is that people outside the young age of 13-18 years have very little interest in gag gifts, so gift accordingly!
Overall, experience gifts reign supreme for all ages outside of 13-18 years (where electronics, joke/gag gifts, and toys/games are the most wanted) and 65+ years (where clothing/accessories win out at 71.2% popularity).
Future Work
In this blog post, we only took a look at peoples favorite type of gifts to receive. In a future post, we will take a deep dive into the last question on the survey: What is important to you in a gift? This will be quite interesting to look at and will give us an understanding of what various people look for in a gift. Is it meaning? value? usefulness? We will go over this and more in our next gifting stats post, so subscribe to stay tuned!
Another area of future work is to conduct a similar survey where household income is a demographic question. This will allow us to determine how gift interest change depending on the recipients economic well-being, something we are yet to examine.
Conclusion
In this post we used a data-driven approach to determine what gifts people like receiving the most. We split the data up by gender and age, allowing us to answer more specific questions such as: what gifts do men like? What gifts do girls like? And what gifts do people of various ages like? The answer was very heavily in favor of experience gifts, which is an interesting type of gift that many people don’t usually think of when purchasing a gift. We will be sure to put together collections of experience gifts in the near future so you can discover some amazing experience gift ideas that are out there. In the meantime, we have some cool experience gifts in our recent post, gifts for non-materialistic men, such as a brewery tour, so be sure to check them out!