Abstract
While consumers' perceptions of creative products' framing typicality are guided by existing category structures, research on social evaluation emphasizes consumers' active role in shaping and redefining these structures. To tackle consumers being caught in the framing, we propose consumer reactivity as a mediator between framing typicality and market appeal, defined as consumers' extension and modification of categorical guidance in social evaluations. Specifically, we suggest that creative products with less typical framings elicit greater consumer reactivity, which in turn enhances their market appeal. Empirical analyses of a unique dataset of games on Steam using BERT-based measures, topic modeling, and psycholinguistic analysis (LIWC) lend support to our theoretical arguments. Our work contributes to creative market studies and the category literature.