Today in Digital Marketing - Deep Dive: Why the Religious Complain More About Your Brand

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Wednesday, February 28th, and as you hear this, I am on a plane coming home, but still technically on vacation. So until tomorrow when we resume our regular episodes, please enjoy this deep dive interview. Well, it's going to happen. Someone from your company is 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,

Starting point is 00:00:29 but also their personal moral stance, how religious they are, and so on. 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. Reza Cassidy 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. And as we are in Easter weekend, a very important time in the Christian calendar, I have asked him to walk us through their findings.

Starting point is 00:01:04 Hello, Reza. Hey, Todd. Nice meeting you. You as well. So really, religious people are less forgiving of brands' mistakes? Apparently so. We found it surprising, actually, when we first found it. And that's why we did more investigations, did several studies just to confirm our findings. And apparently it's true. We've seen it from different multiple perspectives of the data and we can confirm that that's the case why do you think that is um i originally i thought it's maybe because of their expectations but when we look at theological basis for that actually we found that most religious people, they emphasize not only on forgiveness, but also on fairness. So because 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.

Starting point is 00:02:01 So they would react strongly compared to those who are non-religious. I see. So they're trying to reach some sort of equilibrium on justice. 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. How did you come to this conclusion? You did a bunch of studies, and one of them involved a whole bunch of Yelp reviews. Yeah, correct.

Starting point is 00:02:30 So the Yelp reviews is actually just an indication of whether more religious people, because we would expect that more religious people, they would rate restaurants higher than less religious because they're more kind, they're more forgiving if there's a mistake you know they're more um what you call it pro-social in in in nature but then when we found that using zip code as indicator of religiosity based on church membership per capita we found that in more religious areas actually the rating is lower than um less religious areas, actually the rating is lower than less religious areas. So actually, more religious consumers are more harsh in terms of giving ratings. And we believe that it's driven by their, again, sense of fairness.

Starting point is 00:03:16 And we try to replicate it in a lab study. We give them a scenario of service failure in a restaurant. Throughout four studies, we can confirm that indeed, when failure happens, religious people react stronger, they express less satisfaction and more negative word of mouth. You're talking about the review or the experiment you did, where people were told that they had reserved an ocean view table at a restaurant for their birthday dinner. Yes. But when they arrived, they didn't get it because the restaurant had a first come first serve policy

Starting point is 00:03:49 that wasn't disclosed to them at the time of the table reservation. And then they had to wait a half an hour to get a table with no view. Then you also asked, essentially, how religious are you? Did the results from that experiment line up with your Yelp findings? Yes, the results line up with our Yelp findings. So basically, we ask the questions at the end of the survey. So there's no way they're exposed to the religious questions in the beginning because it will affect their responses.

Starting point is 00:04:15 So we did ask at the end of the questions, the survey, we asked different items for religiosity. We don't really ask how religious are you? We ask, do you believe in God? Do you believe that God exists? That's for religious belief. We also measure religious commitment inventory, which is basically how many times you go to church

Starting point is 00:04:35 or religious activities, how much you give, so some religious behavior, even like daily prayers. So with those two different constructs, religious belief and religiosity, we found stable effects that religious people are more likely to engage in negative word of mouth. When they encounter that problem, they are more likely to tell their friends about the issue. I want to ask you in a moment about religious priming, which was one of the solutions you offered, and then how marketers can change what we're doing to try to account for this. But part of the data pull that you had

Starting point is 00:05:10 for the Yelp study included the words used in the review. And it struck me that that is not, that's not an easy thing to discern the true understanding. You know, I'm thinking about the word sick, for instance. You know, sick could be very negative in the context of a restaurant, but it's also a very positive term that young people use. You know, like that ride we went on was sick, right? How did you determine sentiment at scale? Okay, so we did not, I think in our JMR published paper, we did not include the mood analysis for the words we just use rating

Starting point is 00:05:47 as an evidence that you know release people has lower rating but we did actually thought analyze the the mood in another study which we didn't end up include in our publication we use liwc as a sentiment software, where you can actually capture the emotions, either positive or negative emotions from someone's expression. So if someone says something in a review, you can use this software to analyze how many positive words, how many negative words. They do have like a dictionary of positive and negative words, and they aggregate everything to, you know, make sure whether it's positive or negative. We actually found some effects, but because I think we just don't want to complicate the story when we publish a paper, so we didn't end up including it

Starting point is 00:06:36 in a final paper. But that's a good question, Thaddeus. We did actually analyze the sentiment of the words. How did you distinguish between people who were residents of that area and people who were tourists to that area? Yeah, that's not a good question. So, that's a limitation that we have. That's why the zip code is not a perfect measure for religiosity. Obviously, someone who, you know, live a review in California, maybe in less religious counties of state, they might come from, you know, Midwest, which is more religious and vice versa. So

Starting point is 00:07:09 having knowing that the data wasn't perfect, we replicated in a lab study, because in a lab study we can actually measure, like what you said, you know, do you believe in God and that sort of thing. So across four lab studies and field

Starting point is 00:07:25 study we find converging effects that the effects are stable across different data one of the experiments you did that i thought was fascinating was you looked for a difference in how people reviewed things on sundays and also in december during what at least for christians is an especially meaning meaningful month, what did you learn about those dates in particular? So we found that Sundays in December, especially, and we didn't try Easter, but as this project is the weekend, maybe if we try Easter also, I think it's going to work like it's the weekend so um we found that sundays in december is a natural priming for people on sundays every sunday you know in december they would more likely think about god

Starting point is 00:08:13 about jesus especially in the christian sort of neighborhood or in a state you know highly religious areas or hardly these people uh reminded them of Christian beliefs, of how they were taught during Christmas, you know, growing up. So those things bring up their religious values, which are strongly associated with forgiveness. So we argue that on Sundays in December, if things are, you know, not as expected in a store or in a restaurant, then you would be more forgiving because you are naturally primed to think about God during those dates.

Starting point is 00:08:49 Oh, interesting. I see. Okay, so as a general rule, people who are lean, more religious, tend to have sort of less tolerance for negative behavior from a brand, but on days like Sundays and Christmas and Easter, they're more forgiving. That's right, yeah, because Sundays act as a natural priming stimuli, and we did prove it in our separate lab studies. We asked them to say something,

Starting point is 00:09:19 what they think about Sunday and what they think about December. These are different sort of people, even the non-religious, and we ask them to write like an essay or something and then we analyze the essay we found that for non-religious uh the word sundays and december is always like associated with religion or god or things like that and really i mean i guess there's sort of two reasons why people will spread negative word of mouth. Either they genuinely want to warn other consumers, or they want to punish the brand, and sometimes both, often both. I think that's fair to say. Did you see a

Starting point is 00:09:56 difference between religious and non-religious people in terms of why they spread bad news? Contrary to what we believe, that apparently religious people do not want to engage in negative word of mouth to help other people. They want to engage in negative word of mouth to vent their anger, vent their frustration. So when it's in the revenge scenario,

Starting point is 00:10:17 the effects hold. So yeah, religious still leads to more negative word of mouth in the revenge scenario, like revenge motivation, but in helping, there's no effects whatsoever. Again, you know, contrary to what we believe, but it again demonstrates that it's actually the revenge motivation that drives religious people to engage in negative word of mouth. I know you didn't study the differences between religions, like how Christians might react differently than Jews or Buddhists, but do you have a gut feel on

Starting point is 00:10:44 that? My gut feeling is if we have enough data, I think they would react similarly because the notion of forgiveness and fairness are pretty common across major religions. So let's say if we do a study in the Middle East, where the majority of the respondents would be Muslim, and then if we use, for example, Friday or Ramadan as their holy month, which is a religious priming stimuli, I think the results will also hold. Because, again, it's a universal value in religion about forgiveness and fairness. You've mentioned this term religious priming, and my reading of your study was that it's possible to turn around this sort of negative word of mouth if you can expose people to this, as you call it, religious priming. So, can we first talk about what that is?

Starting point is 00:11:29 What does that mean? Okay. So, priming is when you, there's this movie. I forgot. It's a Will Smith movie a long time ago. So, I think he primed the person with number. Okay. So, when you, let's say you see the number number 27 like throughout the

Starting point is 00:11:47 day 27 27 27 at the end of the day you'll be given like a choice from a number set and because you see 27 all the time you would choose 27 so um okay the the title of the movie is a focus right focus it's like i think five six years ago so we use uh the stimuli the priming stimuli that we use is basically we argue that if a people keep being exposed to religion for example they go to a restaurant they see and this happened to me when i was in colorado i went to a restaurant i saw bible verse i think jeremiah 29 verse 11 or something and then um you know oh okay this is like a christian establishment and then it primes me so i would be reminded of very of you know forgiveness if things go wrong in that restaurant i would be

Starting point is 00:12:32 more forgiving um in a very standard situation would be christmas because christmas decorations everywhere even in middle east in in not in you know less religious areas in the u.s we see christmas decorations everywhere. So the Christmas decorations, especially during Christmas season, is another natural religious priming stimuli. We argue that when people are exposed to a Christmas decoration, then there would be, or a Christmas song,

Starting point is 00:13:00 then it would activate their forgiveness values associated with Christianity. So how would we do that? Are we talking about literally dropping religious phrases into our marketing copy in areas where there's a lot of religious people, like the American South or something? Yeah, there's some companies in the U.S. And it's interesting because maybe we never find anything like this in Australia, but some companies in the U.S. like Forever 21 and also In-N-Out Burger, Cookout.

Starting point is 00:13:31 Hobby Lobby. Hobby Lobby. They're very, very open about what they believe and they do actually print Bible verse in some of their packaging. Wow. I bought something in Forever 21. and they do actually print Bible verse in some of their packaging. Wow. You know, I bought something in Forever 21. I think there's John 3.16 in the paperback. And also for, I believe, Winona Burger in their wrap.

Starting point is 00:13:58 They do print some Bible verse there. So things like that would activate forgiveness, you know, when they see that they're reminded of their religion, especially in highly religious areas. But we found that doing so in less religious areas may not produce anything or if anything, it can actually maybe even backfire. So, you know, non-religious people looking at Bible verse, they might feel that or they're being, you know, evangelized,

Starting point is 00:14:26 firms trying to convert them or something that might actually backfire. So I would say firms need to be cautious, not like one marketing strategy, packaging strategy for the whole country, especially given the US has very diverse population and different areas with different sort of ideological beliefs. Right. And as you mentioned, your own research found that religious priming actually increases negative word of mouth among less religious consumers. So how do we do both? How do we religiously prime the religious without alienating atheists? It's very hard to do, especially in a very mixed area where we don't know, we're not sure what the dominant ideological beliefs are. But there are a lot of areas in the US where it's definitely, you know, it's like in Australia, we call it Bible Belt, Bible Belt area where you just, you know, people there, 90% will be religious so we can be confident in implementing segmentation strategy

Starting point is 00:15:26 where in religious highly religious areas firms can be more open about their faith print bible verse in their packaging have more you know christmas decoration or even christmas songs there's some religious christmas songs like you know um obviously not you know i saw mommy kissing santa claus that's not but you know that's a lot of religious that's not really, you know, I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus. That's not, but you know, that's a lot of religious, but you know, like a holy night, for example, right? So in more religious areas, retailers can be more confident using this religious Christmas song, whereas in less religious areas or when areas where we're not sure it's mixed, then it's better to keep it mainstream so that we don't offend the less

Starting point is 00:16:06 religious consumers well marketing technology though might help there should it not i mean because what you're talking about you know kind of going at religious priming in the religious areas is that model would work very well for very broad not particularly focused ad buys i'm thinking like television you know but you know for for someone who's marketing on Meta's ad platform, there's less interest targeting than there used to be. But certainly we could infer groups of people that are either into religion or into atheism. So would it be your recommendation, based on the research that you've done, that perhaps if someone is using a platform that can be targeted that way, or that people can be reached and separated into those

Starting point is 00:16:49 two basic groups, that each group gets a slightly different message, that one group, the religious group gets this religious priming, the other doesn't? Definitely, Todd. So I think geographically, it's hard to do it. Because again, you know, people move to different areas. But I think from digital platform, you can easily target people with different religious background for example like myself i browse some content relating to church or faith you know and my wife does the same so i would be easily targeted by right so for example if firms know my religious belief. If something goes wrong, it's simple email, you know, with some religious stimuli, you know, like Christmas theme or something, or songs, you know, that would induce my mood, right?

Starting point is 00:17:35 It would then activate my sort of forgiveness values. So you're right, Todd. In a way, with digital segmentation tools that we have right now, it's easier to target people and then offering them different tailored solutions based on their ideological beliefs. Your research looked mostly at like everyday service failures. Yeah. Do you think your findings could also be applied to other types of brand transgressions like

Starting point is 00:18:02 major moral or ethical ones, like the use of child labor, for instance? Oh, true. Yes. So that's something that we identify in our future research. I would say that can be a boundary condition in a way that maybe priming works for everyday failure situations. But when the failure has really had moral implications like what you say the use of child labor or you know um underpaying workers right so that again like a strong issue of fairness there i would say uh religious priming would maybe work the other way around you know people who are prime with god may be actually less forgiving in that situation because that failure relates strongly to fairness issues beyond their own interests you know in some someone else's

Starting point is 00:18:54 especially vulnerable community so the priming can work the other way around it can actually make them more take more revenge spread more negative word of mouth to take this company down because this company violates strong fairness norms among vulnerable communities. So there is a point at which Jesus cannot help your brand. That's right. Yeah. So there's always a limit as to what priming can do. And I think in those situations that you mentioned, examples you mentioned about moral failure, definitely can work work the other way

Starting point is 00:19:27 around what surprised you the most about your findings um the basic things that religious people are more you know harsh when it comes to reviewing things and they spread more negative robot it's like they sort of hold this anger inside of them. And when there's an opportunity to actually engage, not engage directly, but to, you know, revenge indirectly through negative word of mouth, they would do that.

Starting point is 00:19:56 So it's like a suppression method instead of forgiving automatically. So I found that when I also read the psychology literature, I found that yeah, religious people are not always forgiving because it's, you know, it's deep inside. And we found that you need to activate, you need to remind people about their beliefs so that they forgive. It's not something that is automatic. Forgiveness is something that needs to be triggered among religious people. I'm curious to know what made you want to study this. Religion has always been an important part of my life growing up. When I started my academic career, it wasn't easy to publish on religious stuff because there was not much interest on it,

Starting point is 00:20:36 especially in marketing literature. And then about six, eight years ago, there was this paper in psychology, science, I think, about priming, which then leads to emerging interest in marketing management, in business literature, to study the importance of religion. So I was one of the first pioneers working on the topic. And then when we found the converging evidence from Yelp and lab studies, we know this is something that general marketing research would love because we have, you know, different multiple perspectives from different data points to prove that religion is not something simple. The effects are not always something we expect that, you know, marketers need to be wary of the effects of religion on consumer behavior. Well, certainly interesting research.

Starting point is 00:21:26 I'm delighted you could share it with us. Thank you so much. Thank you, Todd, for the opportunity. Riza Cassidy is an associate professor of marketing at Macquarie University. The paper he co-authored is called Religious Belief, Religious Priming, a Negative Word of Mouth, and it is in the Journal of Marketing Research. He joined me from Melbourne, Australia.

Today in Digital Marketing - Deep Dive: Why the Religious Complain More About Your Brand

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.