Do the non-religious have greater brand loyalty?
aftau.org
aftau.org
Comsumers who are deeply religious are less likely to display an explicit preference for a particular brand, while more secular populations are more prone to define their self-worth through loyalty to corporate brands instead of religious denominations
This whole thing is based on the faulty premise that a non-religious person desperately needs a religion-like source of self worth and that this can be provided by joining some kind of economic cult.
One might just as easily shout out a hypothesis that non-religious people are more likely to make informed decisions based on actual data and hence stick to products that have been verified to work, whereas non-religious people categorize everything simply by whatever it says on label regardless of reality and are more likely to put blind faith in everyday decisions.
I'm not saying "my" hypothesis is any better, but at least I'm not presenting it as fact.
> One might just as easily shout out a hypothesis that non-religious people are more likely to make informed decisions based on actual data and hence stick to products that have been verified to work, whereas religious people categorize everything simply by whatever it says on label regardless of reality and are more likely to put blind faith in everyday decisions.
However, I think this is counteracted by this part of the data (emphasis mine):
> Researchers discovered that those participants who wrote about their religion prior to the shopping experience were less likely to pick national brands when it came to products linked to appearance or self-expression — specifically, products which reflected status, such as fashion accessories and items of clothing.
If I understand correctly, this means that the religious and non-religious went with name brands equally often when the products were utilitarian (e.g. batteries and pain reliever medications) but the non-religious were more likely to pick famous brands when the products had a strong cultural signaling functions (e.g. sunglasses and fashion accessories).
Seeing as that signaling group loyalties is widely understood to be the (evolutionary) purpose of many, many human actions, is it that surprising that people already signaling loyalties in one area (religion) are less likely to be inclined to signal loyalties in another (cultural/fashion/political)? This is hardly an endorsement of theism or atheism, just a fact of human nature.
Anyway, my hypothesis was not meant to be a serious argument (you left out the last sentence of my post which made this extra clear), it was merely intended to show that the conclusion drawn by those researchers is based on a completely arbitrary model of what brand loyalty actually means. But then again, so is your evolutionary psychology which is not a real science but merely a tool to end a discussion by disguising as fact whatever fits someone's world view best at the time. It is essentially the application of retroactive continuity to history on an evolutionary time scale.
Of yeah, while we're at it: whenever researchers pull stuff so obviously out of their hats to explain convenient data, I'm also suspicious of the data itself. Especially social studies can be rigged in ways people wouldn't believe.
(1) Many people have a pretty strong drive to affiliate themselves to things. Humans are a social species.
(2) One of the primary functions of organized religion is to affiliate people to each other. I'm Catholic and we're not even remotely circumspect about this.
(3) If you have a prior strong affiliation, you've naturally blunted your desire to affiliate to other things.
(4) Whether you're religious or not, you will naturally affiliate to brands, products, music, culture, clubs, hobbies, and anything else, because you're wired in ways that create emergent grouping behavior.
They'd probably have gotten the same results comparing ACLU volunteers or skate park enthusiasts to the general population of nonreligious people.
I really like this idea! You should shoot an email to the researchers.
So let's take the idea that humans have a natural urge to religion and brand loyalty fills that gap, and turn the idea around: there is a natural human urge to fanboyism, and religion is just a hack to direct this urge towards some moral system rather than some random charismatic leader or stupid tribalism or something. Religion is a vaccine.
Uh, no, this whole thing is based on data collected in a study. Question the interpretation of the data or the provenance of the data based on the paper if you like, but this isn't just some sort of wild speculation, this is an explanation of the pattern contained in the data. Your "hypothesis" is not merely "an alternative possibility", it is "a thing contradicted by the data as collected", a rather different thing.
With the conviction you had from reading it I assumed that you had access to the actual report and not a biased summary.
Obviously, he's not expressing that claim as true. He's using it to point out that, given imagination and a sufficiently broad brush, this set of data can be interpreted to cast aspersions on any group you wish.
Take Sony as an example. Buying Sony meant you were getting a good product. Now it doesn't: generally you have to buy the premium end, or at/and know exactly what you are looking for.
Apple earphones are another example: very bad quality.
Brand loyalty died already.
Brands are good enough for most people. Also, I think there's some natural law against declaring brand loyalty dead immediately after mentioning Apple.
I know no Apple fan that buys Apple earphones.
It's easy nowadays to look up the Amazon reviews instead of just buying something with Harman Kardon on the side, but people still shell out tons of money for Prada shoes. (I think this partially applies to Apple, but not completely because apple products tend to have a large user experience advantage.)
Also, many religions actually actively discourage certain brands. So maybe religious people look more to authority on what to like.