Global Journal of Commerce & Management Perspective
Open Access

Abstract

Advertising Practice & Creative Strategy: The Dark Side of Creativity

S Madhavi and Dr.T.Ramadevi

The essence of an integrated marketing communications program is designed messages that effectively reach the target audience. A creative strategy directs all communications. The creative strategy guides and directs the development of current and future sales messages, brochures, and advertising. A written creative strategy becomes a potential management tool for directing the activities of advertising agencies. It clearly articulates how the product or service will be presented to customers and positioned versus competitors. The relationship between creativity and advertising is long, rich and textured. Creativity is considered to be an important determinant of advertising effectiveness. However, there is a robust relationship between creativity and dishonesty. This research provides a critical first step toward understanding how creative thinking is associated with unethical behavior, two often-discussed ingredients of our complex world. Across five studies, we demonstrated that both a creative personality and creativity primes promote individuals’ motivation to think creatively, such that higher scores on dispositional creativity or exposure to creativity primes lead to an increased motivation to think outside the box. In turn, this increased motivation promotes dishonesty. Our results suggest that there is a link between creativity and rationalization. As Mazar et al. (2008) proposed, the ability of most people to behave dishonestly might be bound by their ability to cheat and at the same time feel that they are behaving as moral individuals. To the extent that creativity allows people to more easily behave dishonestly and rationalize this behavior, creativity might be a more general driver of this type of dishonesty and play a useful role in understanding unethical behavior.