The Influence of Social Crowding on Consumer Creativity

The importance of consumer creativity is currently widely recognized, yet the examination of the influence of environmental elements on consumer creativity is still limited. Our research investigates the influence of social crowding on consumer creativity performance. While past research mainly focuses on extreme crowding conditions, our research examines the impact of a moderate level of social crowding, which is more commonly experienced in reality. From two lab experiments, our research shows that compared to consumers in crowded environments, consumers in uncrowded environments perform better on creativity tasks (e.g., designing promotion slogans and identifying solutions to problems). Furthermore, the effect of social crowding is mediated by approach motives. Consumers in an uncrowded (vs. crowded) environment are more likely to trigger approach-based motivation, which enhances their creativity performance. These findings extend our knowledge of social crowding and creativity and can help consumers and companies improve creativity performance in appropriate environments.

Mobile Marketing

The mobile device is a critical touchpoint between the logistical and promotional infrastructure of marketing and the everyday lives of consumers. Mobile devices like the smartphone are taken up by marketers as part of their efforts to harness consumer creativity and to make consumers visible. Mobile marketing emerges from a longer history of marketers creating more open-ended relationships with cultural practices. This chapter examines the role of the mobile in the forms of marketing that have emerged around major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Google, and Snapchat. The mobile enables marketers to manage more open-ended, participatory, and data-driven brands. The smartphone is a site of continuous experimentation with geolocative, algorithmic, contextual, and augmented reality forms of advertising. The smartphone both invites consumers to participate in co-creating brands and opens them up to sophisticated forms of data-driven tracking and targeting. Consumers undertake the productive labor of translating their lived experience into data. A critical account of mobile marketing needs to account for how marketers shape the development of digital media platforms as cultural infrastructure.

USER EXPERIENCE EVALUATION AND CREATIVITY STIMULATION WITH AUGMENTED REALITY MOBILE APPLICATIONS

While customer information and knowledge need transform in the context of globalization and technological change, it is important for organizations to efficiently meet new and changing needs and stimulate consumer creativity through the use of augmented reality mobile applications. In order to solve this kind of problem, it is important to evaluate mobile applications with respect to user experience. The purpose of this study is to evaluate alternative research methods for user experience assessment in augmented reality, to determine whether the selected user experience survey method is suitable for augmented reality mobile applications’ evaluation, and to identify features, which would improve augmented reality mobile applications in order to enhance users’ creativity and positive attitude. The article presents the analysis of theoretical aspects of evaluation of augmented reality mobile applications, the concept of the augmented reality, the augmented reality mobile application evaluation results and the recommendations for the user’s creativity stimulation. Research methods such as scientific literature analysis and user experience survey are used to achieve the purpose of the article.

Consumer Creativity as a Prerequisite for the Adoption of New Technological Products

Creativity is often conceptualized as actions and outcomes related to the creation of novel and useful ideas within the context of the development of new products. It is usually positioned in the activities of designers who play the role of “the creator”. In this paper the authors suggest “changing the subject” to consumers by claiming that creativity plays a key role in the adoption phase when they attempt to address their needs and preferences by appropriating the use value of everyday technological products. They emphasize that the product value perception which makes a potential consumer buy is the result of this consumer's own activities and efforts. Thus, the intensity of consumers' creative activities becomes a critical adoption factor. The authors suggest that activity-based approaches such as actor-network theory and activity theory could be quite appropriate in studying the dynamics and the design of new product adoption, and offer a comparative analysis indicating that actor-network theory has a greater potential to contribute to the interplay between consumer creativity and technology adoption research.