The Gift of Good Taste

“It’s the most wonderful time of the year”

While for a lot of us this would describe Christmas in a roasted chest-nutshell, try replacing the word wonderful with stressful and the nutshell still holds true for the majority, with perhaps the most stressful item of the festive to-do list being the daunting task of gift buying.

If only there was a way of being recommended gifts to buy for others without the recommendation engine knowing anything about them. How could this ever be possible you may ask? The answer to this is, what if we give gifts not based on the receiver but rather based on our own tastes and perceptions of ourselves? 

This is a psychological theory that has been suggested and the implications, were this to be true, would suggest that we can be recommended a gift to buy for someone else based on our own taste profile and consumer behaviour.

Think back to a gift that you gave last Christmas or, for a Birthday… What was your thought process behind the decision? The finer details would need to be ironed out such as gender differences or age differences but the concept itself goes someway to lifting the proverbial weight off my shoulders.

Or, perhaps we need to consider all the personal data out there that big corporates use to target us? If we all shared that data with each other then our friends and family could buy for us much more accurately. They might know what we’d been shopping for online (yes, I’d love that Rough Guide to Turkey to help me choose my holiday) and they might then know what we’ve already got, or even what we’ve just been selling (hmm, I obviously didn’t like the jumper my Gran got me last Christmas..)!

Perhaps this is not so much ‘the gift of good taste’, but more so ‘the gift of my taste’.