Does how much you care about having brand-name items depend on how religious you are ?
The brand name logo on a laptop or a shirt pocket may do the same thing for some people that a pendant of a crucifix or Star of David does for others.
For people who aren’t deeply religious, visible markers of commercial brands are a form of self-expression and a token of self-worth, just like symbolic expressions of one’s faith, according to new research by a Duke University marketing professor and colleagues in New York and Tel Aviv.
In fact, the more religious a person is, the less those sort of brand expressions seem to matter, according to a series of experiments run by the team. Their paper, “Brands: The Opiate of Non-Religious Masses?,” appears currently online in the journal Marketing Science.
“People with a high involvement in religiosity aren’t necessarily as brand-conscious as people who don’t practice religion,” said Gavan Fitzsimons, the R. David Thomas Professor of Marketing and Psychology at The Fuqua School of Business. This is true at least for visible expressions of brand, like socks and sunglasses.
(Via: Big Questions Online )
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