Making Book Tokens the gift of choice for 18-25 year olds.
When your audience under-indexes for gift buying in general and thinks Book Tokens are an impersonal gift you get from your auntie, how do you get them to buy one for their mate for Christmas? We had to show them that letting someone choose their own book is actually the most thoughtful thing you can do. It doesn’t mean you don’t know their genre of preference, their TBR or their questionable taste in fictional men. It just means you want them to pick the title themselves. We developed four concepts for this brief and we loved them all, so we popped them here for you.
Idea one
Give them their next obsession.
This idea plays with familiar genres, tropes and obsessions, but keeps the choices wide open. Because book lovers rarely know exactly which book they’ll fall for next, we can give them something better than a specific title: the possibility of their next obsession.
Idea two
Dedicated to…
This idea takes the dedication page – one of the most sentimental parts of a book – and turns it into a way of showing someone you really know them. Each message captures something specific about the recipient’s reading personality, from their questionable fictional taste to their ever-growing TBR. It makes the gift feel considered and personal, while the Book Token leaves them to choose the title themselves.
Idea three
A token of our friendship
This idea turns the Book Token into a literal token of friendship. It celebrates the stories two friends have shared – the phases they’ve lived through, the plot twists they’ve survived and all the stories still to come. It’s a personal, heartfelt take on the Book Token, rooted in the idea that the best gifts come from really knowing someone.
Idea four
Don’t give them a book. Give them the bookshop.
This idea dramatizes the experience of going to a bookshop – an IRL experience that younger audiences are increasingly keen to find. Rather than making the gift about choosing the right book for someone, it celebrates the joy of letting them choose for themselves: the smell of new books, the sound of pages turning, the thrill of browsing. It turns a Book Token into an excuse to get lost in the bookshop together.
