The Reflection of the Consumers’ Spiritual Perspective to the Materialism: A Case from Turkey

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to investigate the effect of spiritual well-being on materialism, to contribute the marketing literature and to create awareness to marketing practitioners in developing marketing strategies. The research was conducted on 1243 people 18 and upper age, living in Turkey. Data was collected by online survey in 2018. Data tool has two dimensions; the first scale which includes three sub-dimensions (transcendence, harmony with nature and anomie) was used to measure spiritual well-being -scale's validity and reliability were done by Ekşi and Kardaş (2017)-. And the second scale was used to measure materialism -scale's validity and reliability was done by Richins (2004) and the Turkish translation was done by Tiltay (2014)-. The first dimension which measures the spiritual well-being (29 expressions) total Cronbach alpha coefficient is 0,890. The second dimension which measures the materialism (6 expressions) total Cronbach alpha coefficient is 0,767. The results indicate that the spiritual well-being explain the materialistic attitudes significantly but at a low level. Transcendence and Anomie, which are the sub-dimensions of spiritual well-being, have positive relations -not negative- with materialistic attitudes opposite to expectations is another result of study. Especially the anomie is found as the most powerful sub-dimension that explains materialistic attitudes. Harmony with nature, another sub-dimension of spiritual well-being, is found to have no significant relation with materialistic attitudes.