Strategic Management Thought

Investigating the Acceptance of Religious Propaganda in Religious Communities with Marketing Tools

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Researcher of Imam Hossein University, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

One of the areas where marketing has entered is religious propaganda. Christian-centered church scientists have tried to use marketing tools and concepts to grow their audience. Nevertheless, the combination of the two terms of marketing and religion with negative and positive connotations respectively has always been controversial for some reasons like difference in the views about these two words. In this article, effort has been made to examine the views of the religious communities. For this purpose, a questionnaire was designed and validated by 15 professors of marketing and commerce familiar with religious affairs. The questionnaire was sent electronically to about 1,500 individuals on social networks with target audiences and 71 questionnaires were returned. This article has examined two hypotheses: The first hypothesis was that the religious communities agree to use the term "marketing" in promoting religious affairs. This was confirmed. The second hypothesis was that people with higher marketing knowledge agree to use marketing in religious matters. This hypothesis was not approved. Also, using the designed tool, we tried to identify the mosques' propaganda tools. In over 60% of mosques, paper posters are used to advertise. In 47% of the mosques banners are employed for propaganda. Also, newspapers and emails, radio and television, and finally, the Internet and websites comprise the lowest propaganda rates, i.e. 1.5%, 6.1% and 10.6% respectively.

Keywords

Main Subjects

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Strategic Management Thought
Volume 14, Issue 1 - Serial Number 27
May 2020
Pages 81-100
  • Receive Date: 14 January 2019
  • Revise Date: 12 July 2020
  • Accept Date: 12 September 2020