Your pet and god: A religious case on the antecedents of pet food buying behavior

Abstract

Religion is one of the most important aspects for Indonesians. The relationship between religion and pet food buying behavior may seem absurd at first, but this research has shown that religion indeed plays a definitive role in the outcome of Indonesian’s pet food buying habits. The paper researched the relationships between how close one is with their pets, the presence of religious cues in pet food packaging, on the propensity to purchase pet food, all the while keeping religion in mind using the theory of planned behavior. This study uses the services of an online survey from Google Forms and extracted Indonesian samples of 111 respondents living or working in Jakarta and its vicinity. It was found that there is an insignificant direct relationship between pet attachment and propensity to purchase pet food, but there are significant relationships between the mediating relation of using religious cues in pet food packaging with pet attachment and pet owner’s religion. This paper lays a foundation of explaining the context of religion and pet food buying for future researchers to refer to.