Gift Message Sentiment: Love Led Gifting This Week

Couples marked another year together with engraved bracelets this week. Families sent keepsakes that were really just a way of saying I love you out loud. Across worldwide gifting, that loving register sat behind 38% of all gift messages, the largest of the week by a clear margin.

It was not one occasion doing it. Anniversary keepsakes, new baby arrivals and plain everyday gifts all carried the same tone. Family members and couples together made more than half of the week's gifting choices, and kind, caring notes followed close behind at 35%.

The busiest thing in gifting right now is affection with a clasp on it.

Notes of encouragement keep climbing

The smaller movement is the more interesting one. Notes of encouragement have grown for three straight weeks, and they now travel with 3% of gifting. Small number, clear direction.

The timing fits. Somebody is heading into a new term, a new job or a hard stretch, and friends, parents and grandparents are showing up early with small packages. Books were among the ten most gifted items of the week, alongside pencils, boxes and treats, which is exactly what the back-to-school window looks like from the inside.

Encouragement gifting behaves differently from birthday gifting. There is no date on it, so it arrives whenever someone thinks of it, which means the gift option needs to be there on an ordinary Tuesday.

Affection arrived in plenty of languages

Just over half of gifting crossed a border this week, at 57%. Jewelry counters and florists sent earrings, necklaces and bouquets well past their own markets, and the notes came along in Spanish, Turkish, French, Arabic and Swedish. Nearly a fifth of all gift messages, 17%, were written in something other than English.

The occasions shift with the map. In the United Kingdom, birthday gifting took two of every three gifts. In Australia, birthdays still led, but new baby gifts and gifts of comfort claimed a real slice of the week. In the United States, gifts with no occasion attached were nearly a third of everything.

Turkey, Canada, Mexico, France, Malta and India all appeared in the week as well, which is a reminder that a gifting page written for one country is a gifting page missing several.

What this means for merchants

When almost three quarters of gifting carries love or care in the note, the message field is not a nice extra. It is the part of the gift the recipient keeps. Stores selling keepsakes, jewelry, books or anything personalized should make writing that note the easiest step in the checkout, not the fiddliest.

Then make it available in the shopper's language, and make it available all year. The loud occasions get the marketing budget, but the encouragement gift and the just-because gift are what fill the quiet weeks between them.