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This research aims to investigate effect of consumer creativity on their evaluations of brands. Consumers’ creative participation is often used by online retailers as a promotional tool nowadays. The authors propose that consumer creativity exerts a positive impact on brand attitudes by affecting their attitudes toward the creative activity itself. Furthermore, consumer creativity moderates the effect of consumers’ perceived level of fit on their acceptance of brand extensions, such that creative consumers will show a higher level of acceptance of distant brand extensions.

The authors test their hypotheses in three laboratory experiments. Study 1 examines the effect of consumer creativity on brand evaluations. Study 2 explores the moderating effect of consumer creativity on perceived level of fit on acceptance of brand extensions. Study 3 replicates the authors findings in Studies 1 and 2 using a better representative sample and a different type of creative task.

Study 1 finds that consumer creativity results in a positive attitude toward brand; this effect is mediated by attitude toward the creative activity. Study 2 shows that creativity leads to a greater level of brand acceptance when the brand extension has a low fit with the focal brand. Study 3 further provides evidence of proposed effects using a different type of creative task with a more representative sample.

In the experiments, this study examined three types of online creative marketing communication activities. Future research could examine other types of consumer creative activities so as to enhance the generalizability of the findings.

Our results provide important implications for firms that intend to exploit the promises of online creativity-themed marketing communications. First, because consumers’ attitudes toward the focal brand hinge on their attitudes toward the creative activity, it is important that firms design their creativity-themed activities carefully, so that they are attractive to the users. Second, firms can exploit the creativity edge by launching new brand extensions that target creative consumers. This effect is even more pronounced when the brand extension exhibits a low fit with the focal brand. These guidelines suggest that firms’ investments in online creativity-themed marketing communications can pay off in terms of improved consumers’ attitudes toward the firms’ brands and brand extensions.

This research makes several theoretical contributions. First, the authors explore the important role of creativity in the context of brand attitudes and brand extensions. This study adds to extant consumer creativity literature by documenting the consequences of consumer creativity in terms of positive outcomes for firms. Second, by examining the mediating effect of attitude toward the creativity task, the authors broaden the scope of attitude-toward-the-site and attitude-toward-the-sponsorship-event research to the online marketing communications setting. Third, by showing that consumer creativity can facilitate the acceptance of distant brand extensions, this study also enriches extant brand extension literature.

Consumers seldom consider end-use consumption (reuse or upcycling) when products reach the end of their lifecycle. This study shows that end-use consumption can be encouraged if individuals are primed to think creatively, engage in end-use ideation (imagine end-use) and become inspired by more original ideas.

Three studies were carried out. Study 1 tested if creativity priming resulted in more effective end-use ideation (greater number of ideas and more original ideas) compared to environmental appeals and no intervention. Study 2 tested the effectiveness of creativity priming in a longitudinal setting. Study 3 demonstrated how creativity priming and end-use ideation could be practically executed using product packaging.

Creativity priming represents an effective intervention to stimulate end-use consumption with particularly positive results amongst less creative consumers. However, it was not the number of generated ideas, but their originality during end-use ideation that triggered inspiration.

This study demonstrates which interventions are more effective in changing consumer behaviour in favour of more sustainable practices.

Increasing environmental degradation requires consumers to change their behaviour by re-consuming products. This study shows that consumers can adopt end-use if they are primed to think creatively, imagine end-use consumption and generate more original ideas.

Creative thinking has been leveraged at product development stages, but not at the end of products’ lifecycle. This study integrated creativity priming, consumer imagination and inspiration theories to explain the underlying mechanism behind end-use consumption to scale up its adoption by consumers.

New product development (NPD) is increasingly being delegated to consumers, yet little research has investigated consumer-centric factors that may influence this delegation. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to uniquely combine regulatory focus and analogical reasoning to investigate new product ideation and downstream consumer-brand responses.

A series of experiments were undertaken.

Study 1 revealed that promotion-focused consumers (as opposed to prevention-focused consumers) have significantly greater purchase intentions if given an analogical reasoning task before engaging in new product ideation due to their cognitive flexibility. Study 2 tested the effects of near vs far analogies and found that promotion-focused consumers use analogical thinking to a greater extent and have significantly higher purchase intentions if primed with far analogies because regulatory fit is enhanced. However, analogical thinking and purchase intentions significantly drop if primed with near analogies. In contrast, prevention-focused consumers use analogical thinking to a greater extent and have significantly higher purchase intentions if shown near analogies, compared to far analogies, because of improved regulatory fit. Both studies confirm a serial mediation chain involving task engagement, self-brand connection, and brand sincerity.

This research extends current understanding regarding the role of creative tasks within consumer NPD. It also uniquely links regulatory focus and consumer task engagement in NPD to increase favorable brand responses.

Findings offer managerial insights that can positively increase consumer-brand outcomes during NPD.

This is one of the first studies to demonstrate the importance of analogical thinking and consumer-centric factors (i.e., regulatory focus) during the NPD process. This avenue of research is important, as most studies have neglected ways in which to increase consumer NPD task engagement, leaving resources unutilized.

Consumers are known to repurpose products for uses other than those they were originally intended for; this paper aims to focus on an environmentally conscious form of creative consumption known as upcycling.

This conceptual paper presents and defines the consumer practice of upcycling.

The author identifies gaps in the literature regarding consumer upcycling and identifies avenues for future research and theory development.

Upcycling has considerable implications with respect to end-of-life planning for products.

This research identifies consumer upcycling as an environmentally beneficial form of creative consumption and discusses its implications for firms.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a perspective on how new interactive media trends affect the creative process in agencies and engage consumers as co‐creators, based on recently published research and observation.

Interviews, participant observation, and secondary analysis of recently published qualitative and quantitative research (1996‐2008) by the author and leading scholars in the field is used in this offering. A review of emerging trends and conceptual thinking in this area prompts the suggested perspective along with an empirical longitudinal global study on what drives creativity in advertising ADCRISP©.

This contribution illustrates examples of how a passionate approach drives creativity and change for an iconic brand. Ethnographic methods are suggested for reconnecting with changing consumers and environments. This viewpoint recognizes the potential of engaging the consumer and unleashing creativity while pointing out potential pitfalls of misplaced marketing and misdirected creativity.

This paper offers a creative viewpoint and a practical direction on how agencies might be more appropriate in engaging the target consumer. The consumer participates as co‐creator and impacts the agency‐client‐consumer creative development process.

Management within the creative industries can face many challenges, some of which may be unique to these forms of organisations. The perceptions and actions of the creative employees, consumers and clients, can impact directly on the overall creative output and end product. This paper aims to explore the current literature relating to organisational creativity within the context of creative organisations and their relationships with those whom consume their output.

The paper opens with a discussion of the relatively recent trend towards considering social and contextual factors within creativity research. The next section discusses in detail some of the identified factors in relation to creativity and its consumption. The paper is then concluded with managerial implications and avenues for future research.

The literature review uncovers issues of relevance to owners and managers relating to social control and creative: leadership; motivation; evaluation; feedback; risk; trust; role ambiguity and organisational boundary structures. The review helps to draw attention to some of the possible barriers to achieving full potential between the main stakeholder groups during long‐term creative projects.

The review encapsulates many key issues that need to be taken into account due to the nature of the interface between creative employees and consumers. In so doing it outlines how many of these issues may interrelate, whilst providing a number of managerial implications and useful avenues for future empirical research.

This chapter provides an overview of the state of knowledge about creative media advertising; choosing a novel medium that implicitly communicates the message. It explains what creative media advertising is and how it differs from other unconventional marketing communication formats. It addresses the theoretical mechanisms that explain how creative media affects consumers. Its final purpose is to review all the empirical findings about creative media advertising effects.

This chapter presents a systematic literature review of all the empirical research about creative media advertising that explicitly compares its effectiveness with traditional media advertising. The 11 reviewed articles with 16 experiments appeared between 2005 and 2015.

Overall creative media advertising generated positive evaluative outcomes (e.g., brand attitude) and behavior (e.g., word of mouth and sales). These effects were often mediated by a feeling of surprise and an increase in positive thoughts. It remains unclear whether creative media are perceived as persuasion attempts. Mixed findings exist for cognitive outcomes. Creative media advertising seems beneficial for creating strong brand associations, but brand memory might suffer from the technique if solving the link between the medium and the message takes away mental resources for the brand elements in the advertisement.

By reviewing all the literature about creative media advertising, the authors make recommendations for future research and for using creative media in practice. They emphasize potential boundary conditions and ideal circumstances of using creative media advertising.

This paper aims to report on the construction of a scale to measure a firm's stance towards creative consumers; that is, customers who adapt, modify or transform a proprietary offering.

A measurement instrument, called the 3As, is developed to assess the extent to which an organization is aware of its creative customers, its attitude towards its creative customers, and finally the action it takes in response to its creative customers. A total of 178 Executive MBA students were used to fine‐tune a set of items using exploratory factor analysis (EFA).

An empirical test of reliability and validity resulted in three clearly defined factors or dimensions, which correspond to the three constructs of awareness, attitude and action. The relationship between the scales' prediction of stances and a manager's self typing of the organization is assessed, and the relationship between firm stance, environmental turbulence, and performance explored.

This paper provides the first scale for measuring a firm's stance toward creative consumers.

The clean beauty phenomenon is gaining momentum and beauty brands are getting creative with on-pack sustainability claims. With the increasing focus on sustainability from both brands and consumers, sustainability communication has the potential to raise the profile of sustainable production and consumption. Further attention is needed on the creative approach behind on-pack sustainability marketing communications as companies no longer focus on single eco labels but instead use a bundle of claims to advertise their commitment to sustainability which finds consumers confused and brands open to accusations of greenwashing. This chapter explores on-pack sustainability communications in the beauty industry through the lenses of creative marketing communications which need to be both original and appropriate. This study contributes to the longstanding debate on the role of sustainability claims in marketing communications and addresses the role of on-pack sustainability claims design and creativity.

This study aims to investigate the role of middle-class consumers’ need for uniqueness (CNFU), consumer susceptibility to interpersonal influence (CSII), inspiration and behavioral intentions toward masstige products. Specifically, this study examines the differential effects of CNFU dimensions, the underlying mechanism of consumer inspiration and the moderating role of CSII in the purchase intentions toward masstige products.

Two studies were carried out to test the proposed relationships. Study 1 examines the differential effect of CNFU dimensions and the mediating role of consumer inspiration for data collected from Tier 1 cities in India. Study 2 replicated Study 1 findings for the jewelry masstige products and tested the moderating role of CSII for data collected from Tier 2 cities. Structural equation modeling was used to test the proposed hypotheses.

The study findings confirm the differential effects of CNFU dimensions on inspiration and its mediating role in masstige products’ purchase intentions. Furthermore, the study found that CSII moderates the effect of CNFU dimensions on inspiration toward masstige (jewelry) purchase intentions. Status does not determine masstige purchase intention.

The present study was carried out in the emerging market of India. Future studies should replicate the study findings in other emerging markets.

The study findings have important implications for marketers of masstige brands in developing effective marketing strategies in the emerging markets.

The study is among the few studies to investigate the differential role of CNFU dimensions and inspiration for masstige brands in an emerging market context.