So I made a speech about consumer creativity a couple of years ago at ESCP Europe. You can find it here:

I have since been working on a couple of paper about consumer creativity. One paper is

Mobilizing Collective Creativity To Change Market Dynamics: The Emergence of Restaurant Day Under Nordic Governance of Food Culture

Henri Weijo (Bentley University) and Diane Martin (RMIT Melbourne) are the prime movers on this one.

Creativity is known to play an important role in politicized consumer collectives struggles for change, but few previous works have elaborated on the precursors for and evolving nature of creativity. Previous creativity research also has a heavy individualist slant. This study develops a model of collective consumer creativity for market change. Using ethnographic methods and a Deleuzian theoretical framework of creativity, we chronicle the evolution of the Restaurant Day food carnival that originally emerged as a collective response to political tensions relating to strict food culture regulation in Finland. Findings illuminate a process of collectively sensed tensions turning into a precursor for creativity, in turn enabling novel expressions that challenge established marketplace truths. Creative expressions are further accentuated through the emergence of creative rules, support structures, and growing expressive heterogeneity that entice consumer participation but also help warding off multisided contestation from actors affected by the ongoing market changes.  We are able to show how RD mananged to enlist participants in an ongoing unfolding of Deleuzean creative expressivity before a routinisation process descended.

 

The other paper is

Socializing Consumer Creativity

The prime moves on this one are Gry Høngsmark Knudsen, Mario Campana and Kat Duffy

In this paper we contribute to the literature on consumer creativity by developing a collective concept of creativity along three active dimensions and in terms of three practices. The paper is inspired by recent theoretical discussions of context, collectivity, and assemblage in interpretive consumer research. So inspired, the paper advances an understanding of creativity as emerging through socialization and interaction between three dimensions: consumers, artefacts, and spaces, each with their own world-shaping potentialities. We argue that creativity evolves where consumers, artefacts, and spaces come together in combinations that transform cultural routines into novel, yet comprehensible configurations, hence creative ones.  Thus, we contradict the perspective current in consumer research that argues that creativity is a personal attribute or an outcome of the behavior of a gifted individual. We dimensionalize creativity as a process that encompasses collective practices of specialization, co-constitution, and valorization. Through these crucial practices consumers identify and legitimate creative acts. By demonstrating processes of legitimation, we also add dimensions of power to the discussion of how creativity is stifled; thereby we demonstrate how creativity ends. That is, we develop a holistic perspective on creative events, where we outline both the emergence and finality of creativity. Through a novel method in qualitative consumer research of triangulation across quite different empirical contexts, we demonstrate commonalities of creativity as an emergent, contingent property of assemblages of entities and practices. Finally, we thus provide a theoretically motivated sociological model of the social and processual character of creativity.