Self-Gifts from the Self-Regulatory Focus Perspective

Self-gifts are a common consumer behavior and are typically characterized as highly self-motivated, context bounded, self-directed, and hedonically oriented (Mick and DeMoss 1990a). Research on self-gifts can be viewed as two distinct but interrelated directions. One is from the extrinsic aspect, such as the four most frequent occasions for self-gifts: accomplishment reward, failure therapeutics, birthday, and with extra money (Mick and DeMoss 1990a). The other approach to explain self-gifts is from an intrinsic aspect such as attribution theory, which provides us with more precise and richer insights to individuals’ psychological phenomena (Mick, DeMoss and Faber 1992). However, a practical question exists: How to define and segment consumer according to their successful or failure condition and further make inference about their own intrinsic attribution in advance? Thus, we propose another viewpoint to explore the goal and process of self-gifts through the lens of “self-regulatory” (Higgins 1997) and “goal-attribute compatibility” (Chernev 2004) to gain more understanding within. In this research, we intend to further investigate whether there are more effective ad appeals to evoke or strengthen consumer to buy themselves gifts.