Regardless of whether you're involved directly in faith marketing, or you're an ecommerce merchant, it's going to happen. Someone from your company's going to do something dumb, and that will result in a negative review on Facebook or Google or something.
When you break down the kinds of people who spread negative word of mouth, you find different groups — not just genders or ages, but also their personal moral stance, how religious they are, and so on.
When you think about faith marketing, you might think that religious people would be more forgiving of mistakes made by your brand — and you would be wrong. In fact, they're much less forgiving.
At least according to some new research.
The Science of Faith Marketing
Riza Casidy is an Associate Professor of Marketing at Macquarie University. He and his colleagues recently published a paper in the Journal of Marketing Research called “Religious Belief, Religious Priming, and Negative Word of Mouth.”
I spoke with him earlier, just in time for Easter weekend, and asked him why he thinks the religious are more likely to go negative.
Interview
DR. CASIDY: Most religious people, they emphasize not only forgiveness, but also fairness. Religious people believe that justice must be done, so when things go wrong in a service situation when there's a product failure, service failure — that is considered “not fair” — they would react strongly compared to those who are non-religious.
TOD: I see. So they're trying to reach some sort of equilibrium on justice.
DR. CASIDY: Yes, something like that. So their sense of fairness, we found that for religious people, they have higher or stronger sense of fairness, compared to non- or less-religious respondents.
TOD: Your research looked mostly at everyday service failures. Do you think your findings could also be applied to other types of brand transgressions. like major moral or ethical ones, like the use of child labor, for instance.
DR. CASIDY: When the failure really has moral implications, like the use of child labor, or underpaying workers… religious priming would maybe work the other way around: People who are primed with God may be actually less forgiving in that situation, because that failure relates strongly to fairness issues, beyond their own interests, in some someone else's, especially vulnerable community. So the priming can work the other way around — it can actually make them take more revenge, spread more negative word of mouth to take this company down, because this company violates strong fairness norms among vulnerable communities.
TOD: So there is a point at which Jesus cannot help your brand? (laughter)
DR. CASIDY: (laughter)That's right. There's always a limit as to what priming can do. And I think in those examples you mentioned with moral failure, that definitely can work the other way.
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Our full conversation also covered things like:
- How exactly marketers should rewrite their copy around religious dates and for religious people?
- How they do that without alienating atheists?
- How you can expect your own brand’s reviews to change when they’re written on Sundays or around Christmas?
You can listen to this kind of exclusive marketing research on our Premium Podcast.
