Consumer behavior is rife with creativity. Creativity pervades the consuming arena in everything from autos and homes to clothing and a simple stain fix. Nevertheless, there have been few attempts to transform fundamental observations into theoretical treatises and even fewer attempts to record the function of creativity in consumer behavior literature scientifically. The concept of creativity remains an unexplored territory in consumer psychology.
Creativity is sometimes defined as an output (a work, a product, or an idea) that is both original and appropriate to the setting or circumstance in which it emerges. As simple as this definition looks, a modern view of creativity has taken a long time to develop, with different emphasis placed on the creative individual, the creative process, and the creative environment. It is necessary to trace a brief history of creativity research in order to comprehend the present definition of creativity and how its numerous components interrelate.
Guilford (1964) equated creativity with problem-solving. A creative outcome provides a unique solution to a real-world problem, and much research on creativity has been conducted under the umbrella of problem-solving. However, many creative activities, such as painting, do not solve any particular problem. Some scholars consider the creative process to consist of six stages. This includes the preparatory phase, where the foundation for creativity is laid before a deliberate endeavor is undertaken, and the evaluation phase, where the creative idea is tested, refined, refined, or expanded.
Individuals enter the discovery phase to solve a particular creative problem or task, seeking known solutions or accessing relevant inputs to construct an appropriate response. During this stage, link formation is open, although often guided by existing knowledge structures, environmental cues and primers, and external constraints. Incorporating ideas is usually gradual, begins with examining closely related conceptual connections, and moves concentrically outward.
The intermediate stage of creative valuation is repaired. With the natural progression of the discovery phase, it is common for someone to achieve foresight and decision immediately. More often than not, cognitive barriers impede progress. Indeed, individuals begin with a bias towards existing knowledge structures and known solutions to similar problems and initially react to abandon these metals when they fail. The brain is connected to work efficiently and to apply existing solutions to similar problems quickly (hence why creative thought processes tax the mind so much)
After a fixed period, the mental patterns that work in the way of creative progress will begin to destabilize. While new environmental influences or conscious effort can sometimes hasten their disappearance, the critical factor is often simply time. The individual becomes exhausted and distracted. Interestingly, this allows the creative process to move forward again. Removing attention from the problem allows for the breaking of activated patterns and the formation of new associations. This period of instability and reorientation is known as the incubation period of creativity. Freed from the inhibiting mental modes created by past experiences or early promises, creative breakthroughs can happen again.
The final stage of the creative process is insights. Because incubation is often necessary to foster creative vision, breakthroughs often occur after an issue is no longer actively considered. At the preconscious level, the mind continues to think about the problem and push the awareness solution. These moments represent some of the most emotional in the human experience. It is one of the mind's remarkable abilities to access new information without conscious effort. Connect this information back to previously activated problems and infuse it in new ways.
Today's customers are more highly informed and demanding than ever before. User innovation is not the same as a "co-creation" process in which consumers and manufacturers work together to develop a product. Nor is it a form of "user-driven" innovation, in which manufacturers pay attention to user needs while developing new products for consumers. According to a survey, users extensively develop and modify consumer products without the manufacturer's involvement.
Four main factors define creative consumers −
In addition, the growing importance of the web, social media, and creative consumers with the changes in technology over the years. Based on research done for various customers, it is clear that consumers are no longer satisfied with simply being "consumers". They also want to be "creators". Different types of consumers share some of the characteristics of creative consumers, such as core users and innovators. While creative consumers work with all kinds of offers, not just new or improved products.
Sometimes they work with old products and even the simplest, degraded products. While considering the core user case, there is an argument that early adopters, the early majority, can be an effective group in user innovation, not just core users. Therefore, there are three different approaches to user innovation (one in favor of mainstream users and two against them) which will also be discussed in detail.
First, the primary user approach suggests that companies outsource innovation tasks related to key needs to their users, after equipping them with the right set of tools to innovate.
In addition, there is a method of crowdsourcing that aims to outsource innovation-related tasks, such as generating ideas for new product designs, to a wide range of external users. There are various examples of communities of common interest, such as the roller coaster community, the canyoning community, and the disabled cyclist community.
Third, the idea of the toolbox approach is to transfer innovation-related product design tasks to users by providing them with online tools. This will allow these users to customize the product to their individual needs and preferences.
These are −
This theory states that the cognitive level of individuals depends on cognitive complexity. Consumers' complex cognitive structures play a role in performing creative tasks and their understanding of creative tasks becomes more complete and profound, helping them to come up with innovative solutions. According to the loose-narrow culture theory, the tight cultural scenario has stronger social norms and a low tolerance for behavioral deviations, while the loose cultural scenario has lower standards and is more likely to be tolerated. high tolerance for behavioral deviation.
The basic idea behind the influence of culture on creativity is that an individual's creativity is closely related to the cultural environment in which the individual lives. In marketing, companies have crossed organizational and national boundaries to perceive consumers as a potential resource to enhance their innovation advantage.
The theory states that there are two main cognitive inputs: the process of creation and the process of discovery. The generation process is considered to be the initial mental representation used to generate solutions and includes retrieving existing structures from memory and creating associations and associations in already existing structures. retrieval and transfer are similar to a prelude to innovative products. The discovery process explores different meanings to help explain a solution after creation is complete, including evaluating a construct from different contexts or points of view to interpret it as a solution.
To the best of our knowledge, no consumer behavior research has sought to capture the creative thinking processes that consumers go through. At the same time, they participate in consuming tasks from beginning to end. While the creative cognition approach contends that the same mental processes are involved in everything from outstanding creative accomplishment to mundane problem-solving, it remains to be seen whether some processing strategies are more effective than others at devising creative solutions to consumer problems and whether these strategies differ by consumption instance (e.g., consumer problem solving versus more socioculturally rooted acts of consumption).
Studies were conducted in which people were tasked with creating a new toy using a given set of forms or components. They next investigated how specific variables and external influences affected participants' proclivity to depart from the POLR; however, their study did not look at the multiple stages of the creative process mentioned above. Since that creativity requires a significant amount of trial and error, it would be beneficial to document people's cognitive processes and techniques as they work through consumption difficulties.
Creativity can create an emotional connection between a brand and its audience, which can be the key to creating greater loyalty. In addition, it can generate new insights into how a product or service is used. Unfortunately, these benefits are often overlooked, so marketing needs creativity.
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