Adnan MENDARES

Jury

Abstract

Companies involve consumers in co-creation process through crowdsourcing as part of open innovation and co-creation. However, ordinary people need some stimulation to fully utilize their creativity in such campaigns. This highlights the major role of creative briefs used to define creative tasks. This thesis investigates whether and how verbal personification (attribution of humanlike features to non-human) in creative briefs helps to increase individual creative performance in terms of quantity (fluency) and quality of ideas (originality, usefulness and attractiveness) for crowdsourcing participants and different creativity tasks (advertising ideation, problem-solving) and contexts (product, service, process). Chapter 1 explores the impact of various verbal personification types on creative performance of crowdsourcing participants: physical vs. mental; weak (mix of humanlike physical and mental features without purpose attribution) vs. strong anthropomorphism (same mix with purpose attribution); weak anthropomorphism with high physical orientation vs. no personification; and weak anthropomorphism with high mental orientation vs. no personification. It investigates the mediating role of creativity quantity (fluency) between verbal personification types and creativity quality. Chapter 2 assesses the mediating role of mental transportation and moderating role of mental imagery ability between verbal personification types and participants’ creative performance. Paper 1 compares physical vs. mental verbal personification. Paper 2 confronts a verbal personification based on weak anthropomorphism with high physical orientation and no verbal personification. Chapter 3 investigates the mediating role of mental imagery (vividness, quantity, elaboration) and pleasure between a verbal personification founded on weak anthropomorphism with high mental orientation type (vs. no personification) and creative performance. Chapter 4 focuses on another important stage in creativity process: the evaluation of creative ideas. It compares the evaluation by human experts with that by Artificial Intelligence (the Generative AI application ChatGPT) to explore the potential of AI in creative idea assessment. Chapter 1 shows the influence of verbal personification types used in creative briefs on crowdsourcing participants’ fluency. It emphasizes the superiority of verbal personification based solely on humanlike physical attributions or with a predominance of physical rather than mental dimensions, and without intentionality or purpose. Chapter 2 does not confirm mental transportation as a mediator in the effect of verbal personification types (physical vs. mental in Paper 1; weak anthropomorphism with high physical orientation vs. no verbal personification in Paper 2) on participants’ creative performance. Paper 1 also demonstrates the moderating role of mental imagery ability between a verbal personification type (physical vs. mental) and creativity fluency, and Paper 2, based on weak anthropomorphism with high physical orientation (vs. no personification), shows a marginal moderating effect of mental imagery on transportation. Chapter 3 points out the marginal mediating role of mental imagery quantity in the effect of weak anthropomorphism with high mental orientation (vs. no personification) on creative performance, but does not confirm the mediation through pleasure (only direct effects of imagery on pleasure). In Chapter 4, we highlight that Generative AI evaluates the originality of creative ideas similarly to human experts, but not always their attractiveness. This thesis contributes to marketing, creativity, and innovation management fields by highlighting physical-oriented verbal personification as a booster of ordinary subjects’ creativity. Practitioners in co-creation-oriented firms and policymakers dealing with the general public can also leverage this powerful rhetorical lever, verbal personification, in their crowdsourcing activities.