God and Mammon: The Influence of religiosity on brand connections

Religiosity may seem like an odd topic for a book about the connected customer. As evidenced by the other chapters in this volume, current perspectives on customer connections are strongly secular in nature. This secular quality reflects the broader marketing literature, which has paid scant attention to religiosity. Like many social scientists, marketing scholars may doubt the appropriateness of religiosity as a topic for scientific inquiry (Ebaugh, 2002). We have no such doubt, and we suggest that religiosity is a highly relevant topic for marketing scholarship in general and for understanding the connected customer in particular. Thus, we ask, “What is the influence of religiosity on the strength of the connections that customers form with their brands?" Although our predictor (i.e., religiosity) is rather distinctive, our outcome (i.e., customer-brand connections) is quite consistent with many of the other chapters in this collection.