Neglecting Religious Commitment in Evaluating Controversial Advertising Appeals: An Oversight

As the world is increasingly becoming a global village, there is an urgent need to understand consumer behaviour around every market. Consequently, the understanding of culture and sub-culture has become increasingly critical and central to understanding consumer behaviour. Several studies have focused on finding the effect of cultural factors such as norms and values on consumer behaviour, but very few studies have directly investigated the role of religion, which is an important predictor of consumer behaviour. Religion is often used as an explanatory variable to explain differences in consumption habits in different parts of the world. The current study is an attempt to investigate the effect of religious commitment on consumer behaviour towards controversial advertisements using the ‘divine command meta-ethics theory’. The study specifically explores the effect of consumers’ behavioural intentions and ethical judgement towards controversial advertisements. The results obtained by the application of structural equation modelling reveal that there exist significant negative relationships between religious commitment, purchase intentions and ethical judgement towards controversial advertisements and significant positive relationship between religious commitment and consumer complaint intentions towards controversial advertisements.