On Women and Baskets

During the last Xmas corporate party, I won a lovely Marks & Spencer‘s hamper along with some colleagues.

One look at the hamper filled with organic tea, chocolates and egg rolls, and I called chops on the basket instead.

There’s something about a nice free basket that makes women want it.

Evidence of point, my colleague who had to bring back the hamper, since he was the only one who had a ride and will not need to lug the hamper back to the office in public transport, said the basket wouldn’t made it to the office if his wife saw it.

The cleaning lady who later in the week saw the basket on my desk , asked if she could have it , my boss who saw it also wanted it.

So women of all ages and backgrounds desired the magical lure of the free basket.

Its not just the basket, but apparently nice tins have that effect too. Whenever I buy cookies to share with my colleagues, someone will ask me if I want to keep the beautifully designed tin or not. It’s a useful gimmick used by food manufacturers, spend more on designing the tin so that people would buy your not so tasty cookies for the tin.

There are quite a lot of psychology studies on packaging and its influence on women as well as vice versa. Businesses use these studies to find out how to get women to buy more or pick their brands. But I have yet to see anything about the psychology of why it is mainly women that have this tendency to keep boxes,tins and baskets. Could this desire actually come from a mild hoarding behavior that leans mainly towards things we deem pretty.

Yet, we seem to reach out mostly to things that has a storage capacity, no matter how big or small. Could it be that hidden amongst this need to keep that pretty garbage, we need to convince ourselves that it is useful and thus justifying what is simply a hording behavior.

3 thoughts on “On Women and Baskets”

theorderexpert says:

July 8, 2012 at 3:33 PM

Hi, thanks for the link to my blog. You know, I sometimes find myself liking the container (be it basket, box, tin) in which a gift, or an item that I’ve bought myself, better than the actual product. It’s all about presentation, I suppose. Thanks again! Cheers, Rashelle

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July 16, 2012 at 6:54 PM

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