Disentangling audiences' reactions to creative content and creative packaging

Research SummaryThis research addresses the tension of audiences often rejecting creative products despite creativity being foundational to organizational success. To better understand this issue, we take an abductive approach to disentangle the effects of creative content (how creative the core concept is) and creative packaging (how creatively the core concept is presented and visualized) while accounting for audiences' different expertise levels. Across two archival studies and a pre‐registered experiment, we find that both experts and general audiences react positively to creative content. However, reactions to creative packaging display greater variability: on average, experts react positively whereas general audiences react negatively. We find no interaction between the two variables. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings for the literature.Managerial SummaryWhile creativity is foundational to organizational success, audiences often reject creative products. Across two archival studies and an experiment, we show how the effect of creativity on different audience's reception can be better understood when disentangling creative content (how creative the core concept is) from creative packaging (how creatively the core concept is presented and visualized). Our results suggest that companies should (a) invest more resources in developing products high in creative content—products that break current norms and are different from others—and (b) acknowledge that heavy investments into novel and visually groundbreaking packaging lend diminishing returns, particularly for general audiences: for the same level of quality a traditional (vs. creative) packaging yields more advantages.