Customers exercise their consumerism to satisfy a more meaningful purpose and not just to fulfill basic requirements. We coined the term "existential creativity" to explain consumers actions and activities, which provide them with fulfillment, purpose, selfworth, selfefficacy, and value. Two cases are presented here to illustrate the ways that customers exercise existential creativity while consuming a product. Several future research directions are also presented, inquiring into the nature of existential creativity, the ways that it is expressed, and the ways that marketers might respond to consumers creative efforts.

Why do some consumers experiment with a product like baking soda, using it to clean battery cable leads, or to deodorize refrigerators? Why do some consumers use patented hemorrhoid creams on their eyelids in an effort to remove lines and wrinkles? Why do kids, who purchase Sony PSP gaming consoles, hack their operating systems in an attempt to make the machine do far more than was intended by its makers?

Consumers engage in many activities to make life more meaningful. It is now wellestablished that meaning is necessary to live a full, productive, and happy life. Although there is rich literature in consumer research on the meaning and meanings of consumption, there is a lack of work on the meaningfulness of consumption, pursuing the explicit question of how people make their lives more worthwhile, secure, and valued through consumption. Perspectives on this question are emerging from the study of consumers setting and striving toward goals. Specifically, setting and striving toward abstract, inclusive, and conscious higherlevel goals (such as "leading a happy and healthy life") while consuming may contribute to people's lives in ways that current research has not yet discovered. Further, creating and finding meaning while pursuing consumptionrelated goals may contribute to consumers' health and wellbeing in many novel ways. It is the purpose of this article to introduce a framework for understanding consumers and the ways they make life meaningful and to illustrate this framework with short cases of consumers "getting clever" with proprietary products by adapting, changing, hacking and transforming them.

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