Mediated Effect of Religious Commitment between Individual Cultural Values and Brand Love in Millennial Consumers: An Abstract

Abstract

Given the lack of research on the link between individual cultural values ​​of the Millennial Generation (MG) and brand love, mediated by religious commitment, this research intends to fulfill that gap. For this, two studies were carried out. First, an exploratory study was done to understand the individual cultural values of Portuguese millennial consumers. Then a conceptual model was proposed to understand if the Religious Commitment can mediate the relation between the individual cultural values and the brand love of Portuguese millennial consumers. This research intends to confirm what Sharma’s work individual cultural values prevailed in Millennials Portuguese consumers (Study 1). Then, knowing that they are the individual cultural values of power, tradition and independence, the individual cultural values that prevailing in the Millennials Portuguese consumers, we developed a conceptual model to confirm the mediated effect of the religious commitment between the individual cultural values and the brand love. A quantitative methodology was employed for this research. It was used a survey for the study 1 and study 2 to measure relationships between constructs on a theoretical model. The study 2 follows the two-step structural equation modelling methodology recommended by Anderson and Gerbing (1988). An online survey of Millennials Portuguese consumers was conducted to collect data, between May and June of 2018, to measure all constructs (n = 215). We opted for a structured questionnaire. In April 2017, we conducted a pre-test to 104 university students, where it was asked to identify a brand, in a set of selected brands (Adidas, Levis, Nike, Abercrombie, between others), with which they had a strong emotional attachment. The Levis brand was selected. We measured individual cultural values using 30 items developed by Sharma (2010), religious commitment using the 10 item scales proposed by Cutright (2012) and brand love using the short scale of 6 items developed by Bagozzi et al. (2017). In the study 1, we performed an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to evaluate the items of the individual cultural values of the Millennium consumers and answered to the first research question raised in this paper. The main findings from the data analysis show that the values independence, power and tradition negatively influence intrapersonal religious commitment and that the interpersonal religious commitment positively influences brand love. This study gives an important contribute to the comprehension of the relations between religion, values and consumer behaviour, one of the research area that is still limited, especially in specific countries and contexts and with Millennial Generation.