The Creative Consumer:

This research focuses on consumer creativity and uses frameworks from creativity theory to understand consumer behavior. Because this is a relatively new field of inquiry, the work belongs mainly in the context of discovery. Therefore, the topic was approached in an open, exploratory manner. Instead of formal hypotheses, a set of propositions and models were developed and tested empirically in a field study. Four concepts relevant to the understanding of consumer behavior from a creativity perspective are advanced: (1) creative cognitive processing, or the degree to which consumers engage in creative processing during decision making; (2) creative product, or the degree to which a solution to a consumption problem is considered creative; (3) creative person factors, or different psychological facilitators of creativity (i.e., knowledge, motivation, innovativeness, and efficacy); and (4) solution evaluation, or the degree to which a consumer evaluates his or her solution to a consumption problem favourably. In line with previous literature, a conceptual model, as well as four propositions about these concepts and their relationships, was developed.