Creativity is about more than spewing out ideas and hoping one sticks, argues Jack Goncalo, professor of business administration at Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The creative process also has psychological implications. It releases inhibitions, and, perhaps surprisingly, helps form connections between people.

“You're reaching into past experiences, preferences and so forth and generating ideas that, in the end, feel like an act of self-disclosure,” Goncalo (right) says. “So, when I share my creative ideas with you, because they reflect prior experience, it feels as though I've shared something personal with you.”

One of Goncalo’s PhD students, Sahoon Kim, wondered if this kind of creativity-inspired self-disclosure could also help consumers form closer relationships with their favorite brands. He discussed the problem with Maria Rodas, an assistant professor of business administration at Gies Business who studies brands and marketing, and the two, along with Goncalo, devised a series of six experiments to see how creative projects can help build brand loyalty. This eventually became Kim’s PhD dissertation and now a paper, “Creativity Connects: Generating Creative Ideas on Behalf of a Brand Increases Feelings of Connection,” recently published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

The idea that a consumer can feel a personal connection with a brand is nothing new. 

“Consumers form relationships with brands that are very similar to how you would form a relationship with another person,” Rodas explained. “A lot of consumers think of brands as like their friends. One way to measure brand loyalty is to ask how far you are willing to go for the brand.” 

Rodas’ own favorite brand is Mini Cooper; she has owned six of the cars so far, even though she has to drive two-and-a-half hours to the nearest dealership every time she needs a tune-up.

Kim, Rodas, and Goncalo hypothesized that participating in a creative activity on behalf of a brand would inspire greater brand loyalty — or, more specifically, self-brand connection —  among consumers, in part because creating requires a degree of self-disclosure and, therefore, a feeling of personal closeness.

Some brands already use creativity to build connections. Lays, for instance, has its long-running Do Us A Flavor campaign, which invites consumers to suggest new potato chip flavors. The winners each get $1 million and credit on the bag; the campaign also builds interest among non-winners, many of whom make a point of sampling the new flavors every year.

This campaign formed the basis for one of the six experiments in the new study. The researchers recruited 200 participants and asked half of them to suggest new flavors. The other half was instructed to give Lays feedback on their products. Then everyone filled out a survey to gauge their brand loyalty. The researchers found that, true to their hypothesis, those who participated in the more creative task felt a higher degree of brand loyalty to Lays.

Other experiments involved Melody Candles, a fictitious company invented for the sake of the study. Participants, recruited by Kim from a booth set up on campus, were asked to generate a list of candle scents. Half were specifically asked to suggest novel scents, while the rest were asked to list generic scents that one might expect from a candle company. Some of the novel scents were disgusting — Rodas recalls dog vomit and a cadaver’s feet — but once again, in a survey afterward, the people who were asked to be creative later reported feeling a greater connection and loyalty to the brand. “You could tell people were having fun with it,” Rodas said. 

(In a later online-only experiment to prove that participants weren’t put off by the term “generic,” the researchers changed the non-creative task to “describe Melody Candles,” but the results were the same.)

In a similar subsequent experiment, participants were offered a choice between a water bottle with the Melody logo and one for a rival (and also fictitious) brand; those who did the more creative task were more likely to demonstrate their brand loyalty to Melody by choosing the Melody-branded water bottle.

Self-disclosure was a little harder to gauge. “People were liking the brand a little bit more,” Rodas said, “but it goes beyond just liking. It really goes into you creating an attachment or connection with the brand because you feel like you’re revealing yourself, that you’re disclosing more of yourself to the brand.”

In subsequent experiments, the researchers asked the participants if they felt they had revealed something of themselves by listing candle scents or providing feedback to a company, and if that made them feel more connected to the brand. The participants who were assigned the more creative tasks said that they did. But, interestingly, when they were told that their creative suggestions wouldn’t be shared with the brand, their degree of identification plummeted to the same level as the participants who didn’t do a creative task: they had revealed themselves to the brand for no reason.

These experiments proved to the researchers that creativity isn’t just an individual act; it’s a process that brings people closer together.

“Most prior creativity literature in the past few decades has focused on how to help ideators increase their creative performance,” said Kim, who is now an assistant professor of marketing at the Shidler College of Business at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. “But now a growing stream of research, including our paper, focuses on the consequences of generating creative ideas for ideators, such as increased psychological well-being. Increased feelings of connection is one of them, since prior research shows that brands can provide a sense of security, playing the role of friends and family. I believe that future creativity research can also focus on integrating usefulness of ideas into the current stream of literature which focuses predominantly on the novelty of ideas. This is because creative ideas need to be both novel and useful, but prior literature has mostly left usefulness out of the picture.”

More than that, working creatively, even if it’s just coming up with new candle scents, can be fun. “There’s something to be said about the process of being creative,” said Rodas. “It feels very liberating because you’re expanding your mind and engaging in divergent thinking. And the fact that you can create closer bonds with other people just by the act of being creative also speaks to how we should focus on the process of creativity and not just the outcome.”

PODCAST: The Surprising Link Between Creativity and Self-Indulgence (with Jack Goncalo)