Vicarious Pride: When Gift Customization Increases Recipients’ Appreciation of the Gift

Traditionally, customization researchers have investigated whether and why consumers appreciate customization (e.g. Fiore, Lee, and Kunz 2004; Franke, Keinz, and Steger 2009). Consumers often customize products for someone else as a gift and value customization more highly if it is intended as a gift (Moreau, Bonney, and Herd 2011). However, it hasn’t been examined the recipients’ appreciation of customized gifts. The current paper focuses on how customization affects the gift appreciation. We contend that gift recipients appreciate customized gifts because they experience vicarious pride. Pride is a pivotal consequence of customization: Customizers refer pride in the customized product, which increases the value placed on the product (‘I designed it myself’ effect; Franke, Schreier, and Kaiser 2010). We propose that a similar mechanism may occur when a recipient takes the perspective of a giver customizing a product: The recipient experiences pride vicariously. This proposition builds on simulation theory: Individuals react to others’ mental states and actions by mentally replicating them, and this internal simulation elicits the same psychological effects as the actual performance of the action (e.g. Decety and Sommerville 2008; Rizzolatti and Craighero 2004). We propose a psychological transfer between giver and recipient: The feeling of pride generated by self-designing a product (Franke et al. 2010) translates from the customizer to the final user of the product (i.e., the recipient). To test this hypothesis, we conducted three experiments.