Business Schools and Christmas Presents

Christmas has always been one of the most important times of the year for many businesses. Therefore, it shouldn’t come as too great a surprise to find out that top business schools are producing research looking at doing business over Christmas.

Oxford Saïd’s Professor Nancy Puccinelli has, for example, co-authored a paper entitled ‘Regulatory Fit: A Meta-Analytic Synthesis’. Doesn’t sound too festive, sure, but the paper looks at how purchasing decisions made by consumers can be influenced – and why it is that consumers buy so much in the festive period. 

The research is founded on the established idea that consumers can be broken down into two groups: those that avoid risk and those who seek opportunities to maximize pleasure (prevention vs promotion). It looks at the importance of focusing on the consequences which the two groups respectively focus on in seasonal campaigns. Over Christmas, this means that those in the former group might be most-focused on being prepared for the demands of Christmas and the year to come, while those in the latter will be looking at making the most of the pleasures offered by the season. Switching between which of the groups a campaign focuses on, says Professor Puccinelli, is not at all a difficult task, so it’s easy enough to target both!

Festive MBA research: Not just for businesses….

But academics aren’t always focused on the machinations of business itself.  Research produced at the Yale School of Management, the USC Marshall School of Business and New York University (‘Why Feasibility Matters More to Gift Receivers than to Givers: A Construal-Level Approach to Gift Giving’) looks instead at how to give good gifts – or rather, how to avoid giving bad ones. Gift givers, the research found, are too focused on the desirability of a gift at the expense of practicality. Receivers, on the other hand, just want something they can actually use! This difference is even found in individuals, who from a giving perspective would choose more elaborate gifts, but from a receiving perspective opted for something more usable given an either/or choice between two alternative items (a pen was used in this instance).

And finally, moving slightly away from research and more into actual business, Christmas is obviously a time that many an entrepreneurial MBA will be licking their lips not just at the thought of Christmas dinner, but also the amazing kick their business can receive thanks to festive shopping habits (and not just in retail: it is expected in some HBS MBA-schooled quarters that restaurants will be number one this holiday season).

One group of Harvard Business School MBA students, The Financial Times report, developed an app for children called Tiggly during their first year at the school, which has been enjoying some success this Christmas. The module in which it was devised is more focused on academic learning than actually launching a microbusiness. However it was voted the best product idea to come out of the course, and so a couple of the students involved decided to run with it after graduating from the school earlier this year.

They’ll be hoping for further success over Christmas with their cheap product, which aims to replicate the pleasures of traditional toys while also tapping into the fact that increasingly, small children are growing up with tablets and other smart devices.

One can have no doubt that they won’t be the last MBAs to take advantage of the season…