The mediating effect of religiosity on advertising effectiveness

Abstract

An experimental design is used to test the hypothesized negative relationship between the degree of religious commitment and the attitude and recall scores of TV advertisements perceived to include contentious elements. Tho samples are used, comprising British Christians and Muslims, split into conservatives and liberals depending on the strength of their religious beliefs. For both Christians and Muslims, respondents with higher levels of religious commitment had significantly less favourable attitudes towards the contentious messages and conservative Muslims had much lower recall scores than liberals. The results broadly supported the hypotheses.