To Be or Not to Be - Creative: A Study on the Contextual Conditions that Render Advertising Creativity Effective

Abstract: This research has identified that in the contemporary hyper-competitive business environment, advertising creativity has been recognised as a way to break through the clutter. Although much is known about advertising creativity and its effects, research has uncovered little about the difference in these effects under certain boundary conditions. This intends to bridge that gap by looking at the effects of advertising creativity on ad attitude, brand attitude and brand purchase intention, under three pairs of boundary conditions, namely: (A) budget - premium brand; (B) utilitarian - hedonic brand, and; (C) low - high innovation brand.The hypotheses are based on previous literature covering the dimensions of creativity and of the respective boundary conditions. Additionally, congruency theory is used to explain differences in effects between the variations of the boundary conditions. The hypotheses predicted positive effects of advertising creativity under all boundary conditions except brand attitude and purchase intention for the low-innovation brand.Data was collected through a survey, distributed online under a sample of Business students in The Netherlands. The survey consisted of four different ads for each boundary condition. Each respondent saw only one advertisement and was then asked to answer a number of questions. A series of t-tests showed that not all hypotheses could be rejected. Only in the case of brand attitude and purchase intention the reason for rejection was that the predicted direction of the effect was different from the actual direction. Next, the univariate analyses run on the interaction effects between creativity and the boundary conditions showed that this effect was significant only between creativity and the innovativeness of the brand, and only on brand attitude.Finally, we conclude that advertising creativity nearly always has a positive effect, under all conditions, although it was not always significant. Furthermore, advertising creativity has a positive effect on ad attitude, and a positive effect on both brand attitude and purchase intention except for high innovative brands. Additionally, we find that advertising creativity renders relatively high results for budget and hedonic brands. Implications for practitioners and recommendations for further research are discussed.