Abstract
Imagination is essential to marketing scholarship and practice. However, it is neither well understood nor sufficiently used. This paper encourages giving more attention to imagination by highlighting issues meriting further understanding. Readers are encouraged to ask questions such as: Why is imagination important? What job does it perform? Are people inherently imaginative? What forces enhance and dampen imagination? What do you have when you have an imaginative thought? Some initial observations regarding these and related issues are provided to stimulate the reader’s thinking.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.
Notes
Many organizations have facilitated the arrangement of these interviews. Participants include both academics and practicing executives many of whom were engaged in executive education programs at HBS. Several clients of the research firm Olson Zaltman Associates have provided interviewees. Other firms have independently provided access to managers at different organizational levels and from different functions. Executives from a wide range of industries and global locations continue to participate.
References
Arnould, E. J., & Thompson, C. J. (2005). Consumer culture theory (CCT): twenty years of research. Journal of Consumer Research, 31, 868–882.
Ashton, K. (2015). How to Fly a horse: the secret history of creation, invention, and discovery. New York: Doubleday.
Barabba, V. P. (2011). The decision loom: a design for interactive decision-making in organizations. Devon, United Kingdom: Triarchy Press.
Barabba, V. P., & Mitroff, I. I. (2014). Business strategies for a messy world: tools for systemic problem solving. New York: Palgrave Pivot.
Barabba, V. P., & Zaltman, G. (1999). Hearing the voice of the customer. Boston: Harvard Business Press.
Bargh, J. A. (2014). Our unconscious mind. Scientific American, 30, 30–27.
Bargh, J. A., et al. (2012). Automaticity in social-cognitive processes. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16(12), 593–605.
Barton-Cohen, S. (1995). Mindblindness: an essay on autism and theory of mind. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Batey, M., & Furnham, A. (2008). Creativity, intelligence, and personality: a crtical review of the scattered literature. Genetic, Social, and General Psychology Monographs, 132(4), 355–429.
Beilock, S. (2010). Choke: what the secrets of the brain reveal about getting it right when you have to. New York: The Free Press.
Beilock, S. (2015). How the body knows its mind. New York: Atria Books.
Biederman, I., & Vessel, E. A. (2006). Perceptual pleasure and the brain. American Scientist, 94, 249–255.
Boyd, B. (2009). On the origin of stories: evolution, cognition, and fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Burton, R. (2008). On being certain: believing You Are right even when You’re Not. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Cameron, C. D., Brown-Jannuzzi, J. L., & Payne, B. K. (2012). Sequential priming measures of implicit social cognition: a meta-analysis of associations with behavior and explicit attitudes. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 16(4), 330–350.
Chan, J., & Schunn, C. (2014). The impact of analogies on creative concept generation: lessons from an in vivo study in engineering design. Cognitive Science, 2014, 1–30.
Chavez-Eahle, R.A. (2007). Creativity, DNA, and Cerebral Blood Flow.
Clark, K. (1978). What is a masterpiece? London: Thames and Hudson.
Colston, H.L. and Katz, A.N. (Eds.)(2005). Figurative Language Comprehension: Social and Cultural Influences. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Coulson, S. (2001). Semantic leaps: frame-shifting and conceptual blending in meaning construction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Currey, M. (2015). Daily rituals: How artists work. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Custers, R., & Aarts, H. (2010). The unconscious will: How the pursuit of goals operates outside of conscious awareness. Science, 329(2), 47–50.
Czikszentmihalyi, M. (1988). Society, culture, and person: A systems view of creativity. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), The nature of creativity: contemporary psychological perspectives (pp. 325–339). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Damasio, A. (2010). Self comes to mind: constructing the conscious brain. New York: Pantheon Press.
Davenport, T. H., & Kirby, J. (2016). Only humans need apply: winners and losers in the Age of smart machines. New York: Harper Collins.
Dell, C. (2010). What makes a masterpiece? London: Thames and Hudson.
Dennett, D. C. (2013). Intuition pumps and other tools for thinking. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
Dijksterhuis, A., & Meurs, T. (2006). Where creativity resides: the generative power of unconscious thought. Consciousness and Cognition, 15, 136–146.
Dijksterhuis, A., & Nordgren, L. F. (2006). A theory of unconscious thought. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1(2), 95–109.
Dijksterhuis, A., & van Olden, Z. (2006). On the benefits of thinking unconsciously: unconscious thought Can increase post-choice satisfaction. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 42, 627–631.
Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007). Grit: perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, 6.
Eastwick, P. W., Finkel, E. J., Krishnamurti, T., & Loewenstein, G. (2008). Mispredicting distress following romantic breakup: revealing the time course of the affective forecasting error. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44(3), 800–807.
Edelman, G. M. (1999). Bright Air, brilliant fire: on the matter of the MInd. New York: Basic Books.
Edelman, G. M., & Tononi, G. (2000). A universe of consciousness: How matter becomes imagination. New York: Basic Books.
Evans, A. D., & Lee, K. (2013). Emergence of lying in very young children. Developmental Psychology, 49(10), 1958–1963.
Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (2002). The way we think: conceptual blending and the mind’s hidden complexities. New York: Basic Books.
Feinberg, M., & Willer, R. (2015). From gulf to bridge: when Do moral arguments facilitate political influence? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(12), 165–1681.
Feldman, J. A. (2006). From molecule to metaphor: a neural theory of language. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Finke, R. A., Ward, T. B., & Smith, S. M. (1992). Creative cognition: theory, research, and applications. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Firestein, S. (2012). Ignorance: How it drives science. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Forester Consulting (2014). “The Creative Dividend: How Creativity Impacts Business Results.
Frankland, S.M. (2015). Harvard Gazette. October 5th.
Frankland, S. M., & Greene, J. D. (2015). An architecture for encoding sentence meaning in left Mid-superior temporal cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112, 37.
Gallagher, S. (2005). How the body shapes the mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gardner, H. (2006). Changing minds: the Art and science of changing Our Own and other People’s minds. Boston: Harvard Business Press.
Gardner, H. (2011). Creating minds: an anatomy of creativity. New York: Basic Books.
Gentner, D., Holyoak, K. J., & Kokinov, B. N. (Eds.). (2001). The analogical mind: perspectives from cognitive science. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Gigerenzer, G. (2007). Gut feelings: the intelligence of the unconscious. New York: The Penguin Group.
Gilbert, D. (2006). Stumbling on happiness. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Gordon, R. M. (1995). Simulation without introspection or inference from Me to You. In M. Davies & T. Stone (Eds.), Mental simulation: evaluations and applications. Oxford: Blackwell.
Graziano, M. (2013). Consciousness and the social brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gundry, L. K., Munoz-Fernandez, A., Ofstein, L. F., & Ortega-Egea, T. (2016). Innovating in organizations: a model of climate components facilitating the creation of New value. Creativity and Innovation Management, 25(2), 223–238.
Hall, T., & Wengel, R. (2015). Nielsen breakthrough innovation report: U.S. Edition. New York: The Nielsen Company.
Harari, Y. N. (2015). Sapiens: a brief history of humankind. New York: HarperCollins.
Holyoak, K. J., & Thagard, P. (1995). Mental leaps: analogy in creative thought. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Howard, J. A., & Sheth, J. N. (1969). The theory of buyer behavior. New York: Wiley.
Hsee, C. K., & Bowen, R. (2016). The Pandora effect: the power and peril of curiosity. Psychological Science, 27(5), 659–666.
Humphrey, N. (2006). Seeing Red: A study in consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Jaiswal, N. K., & Dhar, R. L. (2015). Transformational leadership, innovation climate, creative self-efficacy and employee creativity: a multilevel study. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 51, 30–41.
Jaynes, J. (1976). The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Johnson, S. (2010). Where good ideas come from: the natural history of innovation. New York: Riverhead Books.
Jung-Beeman, M., et al. (2004). Neural activity when people solve verbal problems with insight. PLoS Biology, 2(4), 500–510.
Kagan, J. (2006). An Argument for Mind (p. 257). New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kagan, J. (2016). On being human: Why mind matters. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Kandel, E. (2012). The Age of insight: the quest to understand the unconscious in Art, mind, and brain from Vienna 1900 to the present. New York: Random House.
Korn, P. (2013). Why We make things and Why It matters: the education of a craftsman. Boston: David R. Godine Publisher.
Kounios, J. and Beeman, M. (2009). The Aha! Moment: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Insight. Current Directions in Psychological Science. Vol18. Number 4, pp. 210–216.
Kumar, M. (2008). Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the great debate about the nature of reality. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: the embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. New York: Basic Books.
LaTour, K. A., & Carbone, L. P. (2014). Sticktion: assessing memory for the customer experience. Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, 55(4), 342–53.
Leonard, D., & Swap, W. (2005). Deep smarts: How to cultivate and transfer enduring business wisdom. Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press.
Leslie, I. (2014). Curious: the desire to know and Why your future depends on It. New York: Basic Books.
Libet, B. (2004). Mind time: the temporal factor in consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Livio, M. (2013). Brilliant blunders: from Darwin to Einstein- colossal mistakes by great scientists that changed Our understanding of life and the universe. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Lobel, T. (2014). Sensation: the New science of physical intelligence. New York: Simon and Schuster.
MacInnis, D. J. (2011). A framework for conceptual contributions in marketing. Journal of Marketing, 75, 136–154.
Marketing Science Institute (2016). Research Priorities 2016–2018. Cambridge, MA
Martin, C.J. (2015). Seeing the Unseen: Sensemaking as a Systematic Process for Radical Innovation. The EMS 2015 Conference. Baltimore, Md.
Mather, G. (2009). Foundations of sensation and perception (2nd ed.). New York: Psychology Press.
Mick, D.G., Bateman, T.S. and Lutz, R.J. (2008). Wisdom —The Pinnacle of Human Virtues and a Central Foundation for Macromarketing. MSI Reports. Issue Two. No. 08–002. Pp. 93–117.
Micu, A. C., & Plummer, J. T. (2010). Measurable emotions: How television Ads really work – patterns of reactions to commercials Can demonstrate advertising effectiveness. Journal of Advertising Research, 50(2), 137–153.
Miller, A. J. (2002). Einstein, Picasso: space, time, and the beauty that causes havoc. New York: Basic Books.
Mitroff, I., & Linstone, H. A. (1993). The unbounded mind: breatking the chains of traditional business thinking. Oxford: The Oxford University Press.
Mitroff, I. I., & Silvers, A. (2010). Dirty rottten strategies: How We trick ourselves and others into solving the wrong problems precisely. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Oswick, C. and Grant. D. (2015). Re-Imagining Images of Organization: A Conversation With Gareth Morgan. Journal of Management Inquiry. Pp. 1–6.
Pastory, E. (2005). Thinking with things: toward a New vision of Art. Austin: University of Austin Press.
Phillips, D.M., Jerry C. Olson, and Hans Baumgartner (1995). "Consumption Visions in Consumer Decision Making", in Advances in Consumer Research Volume 22, eds. Frank R. Kardes and Mita Sujan, Provo, UT : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 280–284.
Pinker, S. (2007). The stuff of thought: language as a window into human nature. New York: Penguin Books.
Plucker, J. A., Esping, A., Kaufman, J. D., & Avitia, M. J. (2015). Creativity and intelligence. In S. Goldstein (Ed.), Handbook of intelligence: evolutionary theory, historical perspective, and current concepts (pp. 283–291). NY: Springer.
Price, L. L. (2014). Obliquity, Wonderment and The Grand Adventure of Doing Consumer Research. Association for Consumer Research. Presidential Address 2014.
Rajagopal, P. and Montgomery, N.V. (2011). I Imagine, I Experience, I Like: The False Experience Effect. Journ of Consumer Research. Vol 38. December.
Rapp, J. M., & Hill, R. P. (2015). Lordy, lordy look Who’s 40!” the journal of consumer research reaches a milestone. Journal of Consumer Research, 42, 19–29.
Reibstein, D. J., Day, G., & Wind, J. (2009). Is marketing academia losing its Way? Journal of Marketing, 73(4), 1–3.
Rescher, N. (2009). Unknowability: an inquiry into the limits of knowledge. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Rescher, N. (2010). An introduction to the problems of philosophy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Root-Bernstein. (1989). Discovering: inventing and solving problems at the frontiers of scientific knowledge. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Runco, M. A. (2014). Creativity: theories and themes: research, development, and practice (2nd ed.). New York: Elsevier.
Sasser, S. L., Koslow, S., & Kilgour, M. (2013). Matching creative agencies with results-driven marketers: Do client really need highly creative advertising? Journal of Advertising Research, 53(3), 297–312.
Schacter, D., Addis, D. R., & Buckner, R. L. (2008). Episodic simulation of future events. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1124, 39–60.
Schulz, K. (2010). Being wrong: adventures in the margin of error. New York: Harper Collins.
Schwartz, M. A. (2008). The importance of stupidity in scientific research. Journal of Cell Science, 121, 1771.
Stein, K. (2007). The genius engine: where memory, reason, passion, viiolence, and creativity intersect in the human brain. New York: Wiley.
Sternberg, R. J., & Davidson, J. E. (Eds.). (1995). The nature of insight. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Tarvis, C., & Aronson, E. (2007). Mistakes were made (but Not by Me): Why We justify foolish beliefs, Bad decisions, and hurtful acts. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Thagard, P. (2010). How brains make mental models. In Magnani (Ed.), Model-based reasoning in science and technology. Berlin: Springer.
Thibodeau, P. H., & Boroditsky, L. (2011). Metaphors We think with: The role of metaphor in reasoning. PloS One, 6(2), e16782.
Tomasello, M. (2009). The cultural origins of human cognition. Boston: Harvard University Press.
Tough, P. (2012). How children succeed: grit, curiosity, and the hidden power of character. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Varan, D., Lang, A., Barwise, P., Weber, R., & Bellman, S. (2015). How reliable are Neuromarketers’ measures of advertising effectiveness? data from ongoing research holds No common truth among vendors”. Journal of Advertising Research, 55(2), 176–191.
Vartanian, O., & Goel, V. (2005). Neural correlates of creative cognition. In C. Martinadale, P. Locher, & V. Petrov (Eds.), Evolutionary and neurocognitive approaches to aesthetics, creativity and the arts Amityville. New York: Baywood Publishing.
Von Stumm, S., Hell, B., & Chamorro-Premuzie, T. (2011). The humgry mind: intellectual curiosity is the third pillar of academic peformance. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(6), 574–588.
Ward, T. B., Smith, S. M., & Vaid, J. (Eds.). (1997). Creative thought: an investigation of conceptual structures and processes. Washington: The American Psychological Association.
Wegner, D. (2002). The illusion of conscious will. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K. M., & Obstfeld, D. (2005). Organizing the process of sensemaking. Organization Science, 16, 409–421.
West, D., Caruana, A., & Leelapanyalert, K. (2013). What makes Win, place, or show? judging creatvity in advertising at award shows. Journal of Advertising Research, 53(3), 324–338.
Wheeler, S. C., & DeMarree, K. G. (2009). Multiple mechanisms of prime-to-behavior effects. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 3, 566–581.
Yadav, M. S. (2010). The decline of conceptual articles and implications for knowledge development. Journal of Marketing, 74(1), 1–19.
Yanofsky, N. S. (2013). The outer limits of reason: what science, mathematics, and logic cannot tell US. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Zaltman, G. (2000). Consumer researchers: take a hike! The Journal of Consumer Research, 26(4), 423–428.
Zaltman, G. (2003). How customers think. Boston: Harvard Business Press.
Zaltman, G. (2014). Are You mistaking facts for insights? lighting Up Advertising’s dark continent of imagination. Journal of Advertising Research, 54(4), 373–376.
Zaltman, G., & Zaltman, L. H. (2008). Marketing metaphoria: what deep metaphors reveal about Consumers’ lives. Boston: Harvard Business Press.
Zaltman, G., Olson J., Forr J. (2015). Toward A New Science of Marketing For Hospitality Managers. Cornell Hospitality Journal. November. Pp. 1–8.
Zeki, S. (1993). A vision of the brain. Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications.
Zeki, S. (1999). Inner vision: an exploration of Art and the brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgments
First, I would like to thank the four people whose thoughtful commentaries follow this paper. They are Robin Coulter (University of Connecticut), Alice Tybout and Bobby Calder (Northwestern University), and William Wilkie (Notre Dame University). Other people provided helpful critique at various stages in the development of the paper. They include Vincent Barabba (General Motors), Michael Beer (Harvard Business School), Nancy Cox (Hallmark), Ian Mitroff (UC Berkeley), Jerry Olson (Olson Zaltman Associates), Joseph Plummer (Columbia University and Olson Zaltman Associates), Malcom Salter (Harvard Business School), and Robert Spitzer.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Zaltman, G. Marketing’s forthcoming Age of imagination. AMS Rev 6, 99–115 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13162-016-0082-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13162-016-0082-3
Keywords
- Imagination
- Academia
- Practice
- Knowledge
- Thinking
- Ideas
- Theory development