What makes a museum product creative? Unpacking aesthetic, emotional, and cultural dimensions from the consumer perspective

Museum cultural and creative products (MCCPs) aim to promote heritage through design, yet they often face homogenization of creativity. This study revisits the formative structure of the MPCM model, which conceptualizes creativity as comprising Novelty, Usefulness, Affect, Aesthetics, and cultural values. Using expert-screened product samples (N = 9) and consumer survey data (N = 545), we employed PLS-SEM to test a second-order formative model. Results show that only Usefulness and Cultural Values significantly predict creativity, while Affect, Novelty, and Aesthetics, despite high internal reliability, exhibit multicollinearity and non-significance. These findings challenge the additive logic of existing formative models and suggest that consumers rely on holistic impressions in evaluating MCCPs. We propose a dual-path evaluative framework that distinguishes between perception-dominant (emotional and aesthetic) and cognition-dominant (functional and cultural) processes, offering both theoretical refinement and practical guidance for assessing MCCPs.