Advertising is often treated as something that happens after value has been created. A company designs a product, manufactures it, sets a price and then uses advertising to tell people about it.
But this view overlooks an important part of how value actually works.
Advertising can itself be a source of value creation.
The economic value of a product does not arise solely from its physical properties or manufacturing cost. Consumers experience products through perception, meaning, expectation, memory and context. Two physically similar products can therefore have very different perceived values depending on the meanings associated with them.
Advertising is one of the mechanisms through which those meanings are created.
Value Exists in the Mind as Well as the Product
Traditional business thinking tends to locate value inside the product: better materials, better engineering, greater efficiency, additional features or improved performance.
All of these things matter. But they are only part of the equation.
Consumers do not encounter products in a psychological vacuum. They encounter brands, packaging, stories, reputations, environments, previous experiences and cultural associations.
Research in consumer psychology has long demonstrated the importance of context in determining the meanings people attach to objects. Robert E. Kleine’s research in the Journal of Consumer Research, for example, examined how changing the context surrounding ordinary consumption objects changes the meanings consumers assign to them.
This has a profound implication for marketing.
If context can change meaning, and meaning contributes to perceived value, then changing the context surrounding a product can create value even when the physical product itself remains unchanged.
Advertising is particularly powerful because it is capable of creating and modifying that context.
A watch can become a symbol of achievement. A car can represent independence. A perfume can become associated with intimacy or memory. A destination can become an imagined escape.
Advertising did not manufacture the watch, car, perfume or destination. But it may have contributed substantially to what those things mean.
Advertising Does More Than Communicate Value
This distinction changes the role of advertising.
Advertising is conventionally described as communication: businesses possess something valuable and advertising communicates that value to potential customers.
Sometimes that is exactly what advertising does.
Creative advertising, however, can do something more interesting: it can participate in the construction of the value being communicated.
Research into brand meaning supports this broader perspective. Marketing scholars have examined how brands acquire cultural and psychological meaning through associations, identity, social context and consumers’ own interpretation of brands.
This means advertising should not always be regarded merely as the messenger carrying information between producer and consumer.
Sometimes the messenger changes the message.
The imagery, language, music, humour, storytelling, cultural references and emotional atmosphere surrounding a product can become part of the consumer’s experience of that product.
In this sense, creative advertising becomes part of the product’s perceived value.
Why Creativity Matters
Creativity in advertising does not simply mean making something unusual.
Research by Robert E. Smith and colleagues found that consumers’ perceptions of advertising creativity depend on an interaction between divergence and relevance. An advertisement needs originality, but that originality must also have relevance to the consumer, brand or message. Their research further found that perceived creativity influences how consumers process and respond to advertising.
That distinction is important.
An advertisement can be wonderfully original and still achieve very little if its creativity has no meaningful connection to the brand. Creativity becomes commercially interesting when surprise, originality and imagination help people see something differently.
Research by Micael Dahlén, Sara Rosengren and Fredrik Törn goes even further. Their experimental study found that advertising creativity could increase both brand interest and perceived brand quality. One explanation was signalling: consumers may interpret creative advertising as evidence of effort and capability on the part of the advertiser and brand.
In other words, consumers do not necessarily separate the quality of communication completely from the perceived quality of the organisation behind it.
The advertising itself can become evidence.
What the Wider Research Shows
Perhaps the strongest support for this argument comes from a large meta-analysis published in the Journal of Marketing in 2020.
Sara Rosengren, Martin Eisend, Scott Koslow and Micael Dahlén analysed 878 effect sizes from 93 datasets across 67 papers examining advertising creativity.
They found broadly positive effects of advertising creativity across consumer responses. Creative advertising was associated with effects on attention and advertising processing, attitudes toward advertisements and brands, behavioural intentions and perceptions including brand value or quality, trust and credibility. Importantly, their analysis also reinforced the idea that effective advertising creativity involves not merely originality but originality combined with appropriateness.
The findings challenge the assumption that creativity is simply decoration added to a fundamentally informational process.
Creativity can affect the way the brand itself is perceived.
Other research into creative uses of advertising media has similarly investigated perceived value as a mechanism explaining consumer responses. Creative execution can give consumers something beyond product information — perhaps surprise, entertainment, intellectual engagement or an enjoyable experience — creating an exchange of value between advertiser and audience.
This suggests a useful way of thinking about modern advertising:
Good advertising does not merely demand attention. It can reward attention.
From Finding Customers to Creating Customers
Data-driven marketing has transformed the ability of businesses to identify audiences.
Search advertising, behavioural targeting, social-media platforms and increasingly sophisticated algorithms can locate people who are statistically more likely to buy a particular product.
That capability is enormously valuable.
But finding demand is not the same thing as creating desire.
Targeting can help a company find the right customer at the right moment. Creative advertising can influence how that person thinks and feels about the category, product or brand in the first place.
We might therefore make a useful distinction:
Targeted advertising finds customers. Creative advertising can help create customers.
The two approaches should not be considered competitors. Modern marketing works best when analytical precision and creative imagination reinforce each other.
Data can help answer who, where and when.
Creativity is particularly powerful when answering why should I care?
There Is No Product That Simply “Sells Itself”
We sometimes hear the expression that a product is so good that it “sells itself.”
Taken literally, this is misleading.
Even an exceptional product has to be discovered, understood and interpreted. Someone has to recognise why it matters. Consumers need some framework through which to evaluate it against alternatives.
Products exist physically.
Value also exists perceptually.
That does not mean advertising can permanently rescue a poor product. Experience eventually tests the promises and expectations created by marketing. If there is a large gap between communication and reality, advertising may accelerate disappointment rather than create sustainable value.
But when the underlying product is good, creative communication can reveal, frame and amplify dimensions of value that might otherwise remain unnoticed.
Advertising as an Investment in Meaning
Businesses understandably invest heavily in tangible forms of value creation: product development, engineering, manufacturing, logistics and technology.
Creative advertising deserves to be understood within the same broader value-creation system.
Manufacturing can change the physical characteristics of an object.
Design can change the way it functions and feels.
Distribution can change its availability.
And advertising can change its meaning.
The most effective advertising therefore does not merely tell people what a product is. It creates a context in which people can understand what that product might mean to them.
That is why creativity should not be viewed simply as an advertising expense or an attractive layer placed around the “real” product.
At its best, creative advertising changes perception, establishes associations, generates emotional and cultural meaning and contributes to perceived value.
And if value is partly determined by perception, then changing perception is not merely communicating value.
It is part of creating it.
