To what extent do religion and culture affect consumers responses to advertising?

Abstract

Religion and culture are integral parts of media studies. Using religious themes in advertising to affect consumers behaviour towards ads has become a common strategy of many advertisers. In a great number of past and current advertising studies, media scholars focused on the general response toward advertising. Mostly the findings of their studies were based on mass audiences quantitative data as a great deal of these studies were conducted for commercial and marketing purposes which has led to a limited approach to consumer emotional responses with advertising in connection with their religious and cultural beliefs. This research attempts to dig in a specific area of understanding consumers feelings in connection with their religious and cultural values in order to achieve a closer theoretical measure of the extent of the impact of religion and culture on consumers responses to advertising. The data were obtained from 99 respondents between Leeds in UK and Riyadh in Saudi Arabia via on online survey.