Religious Identity Essay

In addition to the individual level, religious identity (achieved identity) for understanding consumer behavior becoming more and more attention has been paid. It in relation to religious communities which is personal belongs. Currently, the vast majority of the world 's religions are held for consumption a critical attitude, born of greed in their opposition to consumption, waste, and self-indulgent hedonism (Ross, S A. 1991)Since the 21st century, in-depth development of economic globalization and multinational companies, not only provides to the worlds economy a huge boost, but also brought to the worlds economy many uncertainties. In response to these changing marketing environment, many scholars began to try from a cultural perspective

Engel (1976) thought that religious identity as an independent variable, Martin (2001) is recommended to choose religious identity as a cultural proxy, because the concept of culture should not be quantified, and religious identity has statistical characteristics of cross-country and is the backbone of culture. Currently, nearly 65 million people in the world, Christians are nearly 2.1 billion, accounting for 33% of the worlds population; nearly 1.5 billion Muslims, accounting for 21% of the worlds population; nearly 900 million by the Hindus, accounting for 14 of the worlds population; Chinese traditional Catholics (the beliefs of Taoist and Confucian) there are nearly 394 million, accounting for 6% of the worlds population; nearly 376 million Buddhists, accounting for 6% of the worlds population; however, non-religious people, nearly 1.1 billion, only 16% of the worlds population. Religious identity is is an significant factor to understand consumer behaviour. In fact, due to the religious reasons, believers often under the certain restrictions or prohibited in everyday life

Because public luxuries are strong for product and brand, and brand is oriented by consumer and identity. Accordingly, brands are regarded as images in the identities of consumers and other identities of target groups (Esch, 2010), which are designed by companies to decide their products (Kotler et al., 2009). Luxury brands are highly associated with their core consumer (Kapferer, 2008). For example, Land Rover is one of the worlds company to produce four-wheel drives, is the famous British SUV brand. The prices of Land Rover mostly are depend on middle-class economic conditions and the appearance of the car and speed of it are based on the male identity, mostly giving a image of tough guy. Despite the fact that public luxuries are more relevant to identities ,which is contrary to the private necessities. For private necessities, such as Haier, is the worlds largest household appliances maker, the global brand share of Haiers refrigerators, washing machines are on the top of the world. Compared with the relationship between the identity and Haier, Haier is more focus on quality of its products. The 1980s, coincided with the beginning of reform in China, many enterprises to introduce foreign advanced technology and refrigerator equipments, likes Haier. At that time, home appliances supply less than demand, there had a lot of enterprises which only focused on production rather than on quality.