Four questions you can hold any favor up against, and the research that explains why most of them fail the first one!
Somewhere in most homes there is a drawer that holds four branded pens, a stress ball, a lanyard, and a tote bag from a conference in 2019. Every object in that drawer was paid for by someone who was hoping for a different outcome. Somebody chose it, ordered three hundred of them, and imagined a guest carrying it around happily.
We have spent more than a decade putting objects into guests’ hands at events across Chicago, and we have watched which ones leave the building and which ones get left on the table. The pattern is consistent enough that we can put it into four questions. You can hold nearly any favor up against them and get an honest answer in about a minute.
1: Did the Guest Choose It or Make It?
Anything handed out at a door is inventory until the moment someone chooses it. An object a guest selected or built with their own hands becomes their property instead, and people are markedly reluctant to throw away their own property.
There is real research behind this. Michael Norton at Harvard Business School, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely at Duke published a set of studies in the Journal of Consumer Psychology in 2012 in which participants assembled IKEA boxes, folded origami, and built Lego sets. They called the result the IKEA effect. In the first experiment, people who put a box together themselves valued it 63 percent higher than people evaluating an identical box that arrived pre-assembled.
The details are better than the headline. Participants rated their own amateurish creations as roughly equal in value to expert work, and assumed everyone else would agree with them. The effect showed up in people who described themselves as interested in making things and in people who had no interest at all. It even appeared with plain IKEA boxes and Lego sets that allowed no customization whatsoever, which tells you the effort itself is doing the work.
2: Does It Have a Job?
Objects with a function survive household purges. Decorative objects go first, usually during a move or the next time somebody empties a closet and has to justify each item out loud.
This is the question that separates a candle from a commemorative paperweight. A candle gets lit on a Tuesday in November. A body scrub gets used in the shower. An engraved bottle opener lives in a kitchen drawer and comes out several times a month. None of those objects needs to justify itself, because it is busy doing something.
3: Is It as Good as What They Already Own?
This is where a great many event budgets go sideways. Your favor is competing against the things that guest chose and bought for themselves, and it is going to lose most of those comparisons. A branded pen loses to the pen already in the bag. A logo water bottle loses to the water bottle they picked out and actually like.
Custom event keepsakes clear this hurdle by being things a guest could not simply go buy. A candle in a scent they blended themselves has no equivalent on a shelf anywhere. A leather charm stamped with a date only they care about is not available at any price. Quality stops being the deciding factor, because no version of that object exists anywhere else.
4: Does It Point at a Specific Night?
A logo on an object says that an event happened. A date, a name, an inside joke, or something a guest made with their hands says that particular night happened, which is the only version anyone gets sentimental about.
This is why on-site personalization outperforms pre-printed swag so reliably. Laser engraving, metal and leather stamping, and custom labels all produce an object that is tied to one evening and one person. A guest who watched their own name get cut into a glass remembers standing there watching it, and the object keeps handing that memory back to them.
One Condition Worth Planning Around!
The same research comes with a caveat that matters enormously for event planning. The IKEA effect only holds when people finish what they started. When participants failed to complete a task, or built something and then took it apart, the premium vanished completely.
For an event, that means a station your guests cannot finish in the time available is worse than having no station at all. A guest who waits twenty minutes and walks away empty-handed has a worse memory of your event than a guest who never approached the table. This is why we spend so much of the pre-event consult on guest count, artist count, and how long each experience actually takes. The math is not glamorous and it decides whether the whole thing works.
Which Stations Pass:
Candle pouring passes all four. The guest chooses the fragrance and pours it, the candle has an obvious job, no shop sells that exact scent, and the label carries the date.
Laser engraving passes, particularly on something a person would have bought anyway. Metal and leather stamping pass, and they clear question three easily because a hand-stamped piece has no retail equivalent. Our charm bar passes, and the charm has the additional advantage of being visible daily on a bag that goes to work or to school. Body scrubs, bath soaks, and lip balm pass on function, though they get used up eventually, which is worth knowing when you choose.
Run the test on whatever you are considering, including things we do not sell. It is a useful filter, and it tends to save money, because the favors that fail are frequently the ones with the largest minimum order quantity.
Looking for Unique Party Favors in Chicago?
We are Laine Too, Chicago’s Guest Participation Experts, and we build stations where guests make the thing they take home. Every event starts with a pre-event consult where we work through your guest list, your timeline, and which experience fits the room you actually have. If you would rather your guests kept the thing you paid for, reach out. We would love to help you craft it!