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Introduction
An important difference between humans and other creatures is that we have the capacity to imagine – to allow our mental processes to fly far beyond reality to envision new ideas that do not currently exist. Consumers’ capacity to imagine is important to marketers, who want us to imagine what life would be like if we bought a new car, joined a gym, adopted a rescue dog or voted for a proposed government policy. Marketers use a diverse set of tools to promote consumer imagination for persuasive purposes, such as advertising, retail displays, social media networks and even tribal spaces (Escalas and Luce, 2004; Goulding et al., 2013; Phillips and McQuarrie, 2010; Phillips et al., 2014).
It is a bit surprising then, that a field like marketing, which relies so heavily on consumer imagination, rarely uses the word “imagination” in marketing research (Brown and Patterson, 2000; Forgeard and Kaufman, 2016). Although a coherent body of scholarly work on advertisers’ imaginations and the creative process has emerged over the last decade (Hartnett et al., 2016; Lehnert et al., 2014; Rosengren et al., 2013), research on consumers’ imaginations lags behind (Zaltman, 2016). A reason for this gap could be the work that does exist is disjointed; some marketing scholars assert that getting consumers to imagine scenarios about products and brands is quite easy (d’Astous and Deschenes, 2005), others claim it is extremely difficult (Hung and Wyer, 2011) and some suggest it is possible only for certain types of consumers (Phillips and McQuarrie, 2010). These contradictions in previous research are important to clear away because “imagination is not just an idle mental amusement, not merely an activity without consequences in reality, but rather a function essential to life” (Vygotsky, 2004, p. 13). In addition, it is a function essential to marketing persuasion.
Critics have suggested that scholars might shy away from the study of imagination because they see the topic as less important, “in opposition to thinking” (Casey, 1976, p. 4); however, the most likely reason may be that imagination is an enormously complex mental process (Vygotsky, 2004; Waller et al., 2012; Zaltman, 2016) and therefore difficult to study. The first goal of this paper, then, is to provide an overarching...