 "Back to the present")
During the ongoing festival season, like every year, retail outlets and online shopping portals are abuzz with consumers’ last-minute hurrying to buy the perfect gift for their loved ones. And our 27 years of experience at Titan tells us that the gifting culture during the festival season is not going to cool down anytime soon.
Besides, we have observed the emergence of millennials (the 20 to 35-year-olds) as a vital part of the population driving consumer demand during this season. As any retailer would agree, to sell to a particular audience, you have to first understand the audience.
India’s millennials live in an overcrowded, over-stimulated world that is proliferated by social media. The best moments with their loved ones are now spontaneous, rare and almost fleeting. Gifting is a thoughtful, tangible gesture to immortalise these fleeting moments. Every festival season, the thrill of gifting gives the millennials a one-on-one moment of personal attention, one that echoes familial sentiment and celebrates love.
Being the largest population cohort, the millennials are the new rage when it comes to marketing intelligence. Not only are they educated, tech-savvy and hyper-connected, but are also the world’s wealthiest today. With an aversion to blatant advertising and a deep-seated need to seek and share opinions on all their purchase decisions, this generation comprises intelligent consumers with increasing disposable incomes. Needless to say, retailers are recognising their potential as immensely important to their bottom lines.
Titan’s own exploration into millennial ideologies, through its Titan Company Paradox Panel campaign, unearthed that this intriguing generation is characterised by a tendency toward self-expression, individual choice and personalisation, combined with an unprecedented desire to belong to a form of community. While personal and individual values take precedence over traditional forms of conventional or collective thought, Indian millennials are still deeply rooted in familial values.
This paradoxical nature plays out in the process of gifting as well. Millennials’ motivations as gift givers are both altruistic and agnostic. Altruistic intentions are centred on celebrating their equation with the recipient and delivering them happiness, and agnostic intentions on the selection of a gift being a reflection of the giver’s personality. For millennials, gifting is not a one-way exchange and is intended to enhance the giver’s satisfaction and image. To achieve this, not only should the gift mirror the occasion but should be representational and emotional. It is important that the gift symbolises more than material attributes and goes beyond functionality and stereotypes. It should enable the giver to communicate the essence of his or her relationship with the recipient without the use of words.
When it comes to gifting, important attributes for millennial gift givers include creativity, recipient empathy and the intuitive use of money, time and effort. Retailers need to develop a dynamism in their relationship with this unique demographic in addition to offering them wider product choice and impeccable service. It is no surprise that every festive season is accompanied by a boom in the e-commerce industry, with online portals being able to offer this tech-savvy generation a wider product choice, themed gifting suggestions, easy price comparison, first-hand customer reviews and quick home delivery.
Gifting is a culture that has evolved with the unique and richer nuances of community, and is not solely part of a rigid, traditional construct. Titan’s positioning as a brand that celebrates relationships through the process of gifting has remained relevant and strong over the years. The key is to gear our marketing strategies to where millennials’ values lie and not where the status quo wants them to be. We understand that millennials like to put a personal stamp on everything that they do, and this holds no different for gifting. After all, it is not only the thought that counts... the gifts matter, too!
(The author is CEO (Watches & Accessories Division), & executive vice-president (Corporate Communications), Titan Company)
