Accept God’s Grace of Consumer Acceptance

“For God’s sake, relax. You’re fine as you are.” This might be the internal chatter of consumers for whom thoughts of a loving God are highly salient. Researchers at Dartmouth College, University of Pittsburgh, and Duke University say these people are less receptive to self-improvement benefits of items than are target audiences who think less actively about their benevolent God. When targeting to audiences with faith in God accepting them as-is, marketers do well to highlight product and experience advantages other than self-improvement.
     The researchers saw this effect in archival grocery store data: In U.S. counties with a higher density of religious congregations, the percentage of self-improvement products sold and self-improvement dollars spent were lower. The effect also appeared in a study where higher God salience in religious consumers was found to be associated with lower interest in a fitness app claiming to improve health.
     In my email exchange about the conclusions with Prof. Lauren Grewal, the lead researcher, she wrote, “In one particular study we found that this effect did not hold for non-religious consumers. A caveat is that we studied a US sample that was mostly Christian, so in societies where thoughts of God may not be as loving or benevolent, we would not expect to see the same kind of effects.”
     Findings from a University of Wyoming study suggest that for the “God loves me as I am” self-acceptance, religious faith needs to be clearly affective. These people would strongly agree with statements such as, “God is an important influence in my life.” The affectively religious take comfort in a personal relationship with a divine being. By comparison, those whose faith is primarily cognitive would strongly agree with statements like, “The scripture of my religious affiliation is the word of God.” These consumers take comfort in adhering to a firm set of required and forbidden behaviors integral to the religion. Faith can have elements of both the affective and the cognitive.
     The “as-is” acceptance of God salience has implications for marketing religious belief itself. Those with affective faith in God can lessen resource expenditures on self-improvement. Related to this, they also have less need to strive for control in life. We could add these advantages to the other benefits an organized religion offers to target audiences, according to research: 

• Control over the world by adhering to a moral code 
• Protection against eternal death 
• Certainty in understanding the world 
• Social identity

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