70% Get Corporate Gifts They Don't Want. Personalization Isn't the Fix

Seventy percent of people have reported receiving a corporate gift they did not want — a figure that sits uncomfortably next to the billions businesses spend each year on recognition programs, rewards, and milestone gifts meant to make people feel valued. Laura Hertz, CEO of Gifts for Good, argues the problem isn't a lack of personalization technology. It's a confusion between predicting what someone wants and actually knowing them.

She opens with a story that no algorithm would have called. A young employee, offered a choice of gifts by her employer, passed over the candle, the journal, and the spa day. She directed the funds instead toward paying for cancer patients' rides to their treatment centers. Her mother was going through cancer treatment herself, and she knew firsthand how hard simple logistics become during an already difficult time.

Would an algorithm have predicted that choice, or the emotional weight behind it? Probably not. And that gap, Hertz writes, is where most personalization strategies quietly fail.

Why scaled appreciation backfires

Companies have long relied on standardization to keep appreciation consistent at scale — identical gifts for every customer who signs a renewal, uniform recognition for every employee. The company may believe it's delighting people. The recipients often don't feel that way.

The reason is structural. Not every person feels seen, recognized, or valued in the same way, so a one-size gesture lands differently across a roster. Recognizing everyone identically isn't the same as making everyone feel seen. Sometimes, Hertz writes, the more personal thing a company can do is simply ask.

What does participation-based personalization look like?

Hertz draws a line between two things that often get lumped together. Prediction feeds someone's past purchases and stated preferences into an algorithm and gets remarkably good at guessing. Participation gives people a say in the experience itself: asking an employee what kind of recognition matters to them, letting a customer choose how they engage, or offering options for how they'd like to be appreciated.

The employee whose mother had cancer illustrates the point. Her company didn't need to know that private detail to give her a meaningful gift. It just needed to give her a choice — and by letting her select something she'd enjoy or direct the funds to a cause she cared about, it created room for her to bring her own meaning to the gesture.

The numbers behind choosing

Gifts for Good's own research points the same direction. Eighty-one percent of people prefer choosing their own gift, and in one campaign roughly half opted for a charitable gift rather than a physical item. Someone picks a traditional present, someone else an experience, another turns the gesture into support for a cause. None of those choices is more correct than another, and that's the point.

A business doesn't always need to know enough about a person to predict the perfect gesture, Hertz writes. Sometimes it needs to create enough flexibility for that person to make the gesture meaningful on their own.

Don't optimize away the human part

AI will keep making business faster, easier, and more personalized. But efficiency shouldn't become the only measure of a good interaction. A conversation or a thoughtful recognition — asking someone what they want and care about — takes more effort than an automated exchange, and that effort is sometimes the cost of paying attention to another human being.

Even with better prediction technology, Hertz concludes, the companies that make people feel most valued may be the ones that also know when not to guess.