Religiosity and consumer behavior: a summarizing review

ABSTRACT

This article is a summarizing review on religiosity and consumer behavior. Review findings from marketing literature indicate that religiosity influences consumer outcomes like materialism, intolerance, ethics, and risk aversion. It also impacts consumer attitude toward religious products and economic shopping behavior. A conceptual framework is presented to depict how certain dimensions of religion can explain the psychological mechanisms underlying these effects. Specifically, we propose prayer (religious rituals), religious exclusivism and divine retribution (religious beliefs), frugality (religious values) and religious community involvement and religious identity (religious community) as possible antecedents that drive the previously established differences in consumer behavior. For each of these antecedents, we offer definitions and integrate research findings from psychology, religion and marketing to build testable propositions. This essay complements preceding work and at the same time expands and broadens it by developing theory regarding the causal linkages between religiosity and consumer outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Religiosity
• consumer psychology
• religious beliefs
• religious values
• rituals
• religious community

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We used the ABDC (Australian Business Deans Council) Journal Quality list to identify journals from the A and A* categories. More journals were added in a subjective manner based on whether we had found any articles from that journal, while conducting web-based searches. See Appendix A for a list of all the journals that were finally referred to.

2. We define religious products as those market offerings that contain normative or symbolic religious associations. We have not included products that are used for the practice of religion (e.g., candles, flowers, incense sticks, etc.) in this definition.