Enhancing creativity perception through fear

Abstract

While perceived creativity is a valued asset within marketing and advertising, the literature has not explored external factors that influence creativity perceptions of consumers. In this research, we show that fear positively affects creativity assessments leading to increased advertising effectiveness, and that this effect is due to fear’s positive impact on engagement. Across seven studies, we show that these findings hold for both incidental and integral fear (i.e., fear appeal), for public service announcements and commercial advertisements, and across a variety of product categories. This research extends the creativity literature from a focus on definition of creativity and generation of creative outputs to new factors that influence creativity perception, and also adds to the literature on discrete emotions. In addition, the paper provides insight to marketers seeking to increase the effectiveness of their creative ads.