The impact of religious salience on purchase intentions: evidence from the UAE

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of religious salience on consumer purchase intentions in the multicultural environment of the UAE, more specifically on the willingness of a Muslim consumer to purchase a product labelled or packaged to include an Islamic appeal, i.e. an appeal with a heightened religious salience. While some attempts have been made in the literature to examine the impact of religious salience on purchase intentions, research amongst Muslim consumers remains under-explored. Design/methodology/approach The authors used a randomized survey experiment administered to 148 Emirati educated female nationals. The survey consisted of pairs of advertisements, where each advertisement promoted the same product and the same brand, varying on whether they included an Islamic appeal or not in the labelling, packaging or slogan. The respondents were asked about their attitude to the different versions of the advertisements, as well as their willingness to purchase the product. The authors used causal mediation analysis to explore the mechanisms through which causal effects on purchase intentions are determined. Findings This study shows that including an Islamic appeal, and therefore increasing the religious salience in product promotion, leads to higher purchase intentions amongst Muslim consumers. The authors also identified a number of additional moderating factors that influenced the consumer’s purchase intentions, such as product and/or brand awareness and the type of product being promoted, as well as the nature of the artefact that was included in the ad as the Islamic appeal. Finally, the causal mediation analysis suggests that Islamic appeals increases product attractiveness, which in turn leads to higher purchase intentions. Originality/value This paper investigates the effect of religious salience on consumer behaviour and their purchase intentions. This paper makes an empirical contribution to understanding consumer behaviour with particular relevance to retail hubs with a majority Muslim population.

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“…Future directions: Theory Our findings show that the extant studies heavily used behavioral (i.e. Handriana et al, 2020;Islam and Amin, 2021) and psychological theories (Garg and Joshi, 2018;Nickerson and Nandialath, 2020;Suhartanto et al, 2020) and to lesser extent branding (Garg and Joshi, 2018) and a technology-organization-environment framework (Ngah et al, 2019). Behavioral theories, specifically TRA and TPB, assume that consumer behavior follows an attitude-intention-behavior (AIB) sequence.…”

Religious affiliation and religiosity: do Islamic appeals in advertising lead to higher purchase intentions among Muslim consumers in Dubai?

“…The study is also situated within the standardization debate in advertising and the commercial advantage associated with developing effective advertising with a maximum reach, based on the premise that consumer behavior, including purchase intention, may be influenced by the attitudes held toward a specific advertisement (see, for example, the discussions in Walden, 2012; Shafiq et al , 2017; Raza et al , 2020). For Islamic marketing in particular, the study contributes to the body of work which seeks to establish the effects of including an appeal associated with Islam as a religious affiliation within an advertisement, as an additional communication strategy which is designed to influence consumer attitudes in a positive way and which may increase the likelihood that they will purchase the product or service being advertised (Turnbull et al , 2016; Butt et al , 2018; Nickerson and Nandialath, 2019; Wilson and Ayad, 2021). Finally, it aims to investigate the consequences of using advertising appeals related to Islam not only on Muslim attitudes toward an advertisement but also on non-Muslim attitudes.…”

“…Finally, despite the growing importance of the retail sector to the Dubai economy, as we have discussed above, only a small number of studies have investigated the attitudes of Muslim consumers in Dubai to various aspects of advertising that are typical of the ways in which products and services are promoted in the Emirate (Nickerson and Crawford Camiciottoli, 2013; Nickerson and Goby, 2016; Nickerson and Nandialath, 2019). Of these, the study by Nickerson and Nandialath (2019) is of most relevance to the present study, in that it explores the role of religious salience on consumer purchase intentions in Dubai and looks at the willingness of Emirati female consumers to purchase a product labeled or packaged to include an Islamic appeal, as an important group of Muslim consumers, with stable and similar levels of religiosity (Emirates Policy Centre, 2016, pp. 3–4).…”

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Be Muslim Buy from Muslims: Impact of Retailers Religious Orientations on Consumers Purchasing Patterns

“…They will have to adopt worldwide ethical strategies to grasp the consumers. Nickerson and Nandialath (2019) elaborated that religious Affiliation can be the secret to hold consumers worldwide. Each consumer originates from a different culture with its way of life and its particular piece of moral esteems.…”