Creativity is in the mind of the beholder: hail the analytic thinker

Purpose While the extant literature establishes that creativity in advertisements enhances ad effectiveness, developing creative advertisements is costly and creativity perceptions are subjective varying from person to person. Therefore, it is important to study the factors that influence the creativity assessments of consumers. Accordingly, this paper aims to investigate the impact of thinking style on creativity assessments of advertisements. Design/methodology/approach Five studies (two surveys and three experiments) demonstrate that individuals with higher levels of analytic thinking style perceive creative advertisements as more creative. This result holds for a self-reported thinking style scale (Studies 1, 2 and 3) as well as for primed thinking styles (Studies 4 and 5) and for different product categories/ads (coffee in Study 1, furniture store in Study 2, and juice in Studies 3, 4 and 5). Findings The findings show that analytic thinkers perceive the same creative advertisement as more creative than holistic thinkers. In addition, the advanced creativity perception due to analytic thinking reflects positively on managerially important variables (willingness to pay a premium: Study 1, attitude toward ad: Study 2 and Study 4 post-test). Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to investigate an individual difference, namely, thinking style, that impacts creativity judgments, which in turn enhances advertising effectiveness.