Deep Dive: Why the Religious Complain More About Your Brand

[00:00:00] It is Wednesday, February 28th and as you hear this, I am on a plane coming home but

[00:00:05] still technically on vacation.

[00:00:07] So until tomorrow when we resume our regular episodes, please enjoy this deep dive interview.

[00:00:12] Well, it's going to happen.

[00:00:15] Someone from your company is going to do something dumb and that will result in a negative review

[00:00:19] on Facebook or Google or something.

[00:00:22] When you break down the kinds of people who spread negative word of mouth, you find different several studies just to confirm our findings. And apparently it's true. We've seen it from different multiple perspectives of the data, and we can confirm then that that's the case. Why do you think that is? Originally, I thought it's maybe because of their expectations, but when we look at theological basis for that, actually, we found that most religious

[00:01:42] people, they emphasize not only on forgiveness, a mistake, you know, they're more what you call it pro-social in nature. But then when we found that using zip code as indicator of religiosity based on church membership per capita, we found that in more religious areas

[00:03:01] actually the rate thing is lower than our Yelp findings. So basically, we ask the questions at the end of the survey. So there's no way they're exposed to the religious questions in the beginning, because it will affect their responses. So we did ask at the end of the questions, the survey,

[00:04:20] we asked different items for religiosity. We don't really ask how religious are you. We ask, to discern the true understanding. I'm thinking about the word sick, for instance. Sick could be very negative in the context of a restaurant, but it's also a very positive term that young people use. That ride we went on with sick, right? How did you determine sentiment at scale? Okay, so I think in our JMR published paper,

[00:05:41] we did not include the mood analysis of the words. How did you distinguish between people who were residents of that area and people who were tourists to that area? Yeah, that's not a good question. So that's a limitation that we have. That's why the zip code is not a perfect measure for religiosity. Obviously someone who you know, leave a review in California, maybe in less religious counties or state

[00:07:03] they might come from, you know, Midwest, they would more likely think about God, about Jesus, especially in the Christian sort of neighborhood or in a stay, highly religious areas or highly

[00:08:20] religious people, reminded them of Christian beliefs of how they were taught during Christmas

[00:09:23] what they think about Sunday and what they think about December. These are different sort of people, even the non-religious, and we asked them to write

[00:09:26] like an essay or something and then we analyze the essay. We found that for

[00:09:32] non-religious, the word Sundays and December is always like associated

[00:09:37] with religion or God or things like that. I really, I mean, I guess there's sort of

[00:09:42] two reasons why people will spread negative word of mouth. Either they like how Christians might react differently than Jews or Buddhists, but do you have a gut feel on that? My gut feeling is if we have enough data, I think they would react similarly because the notion of forgiveness and fairness are pretty common across major religions. So let's say if we do a study in Middle East where majority of the respondents would be Muslim, and then if we use, for example, Friday as their, or Ramadan as their holy month,

[00:11:05] which is a religious priming stimuli, we use is basically we argue that if a people keep being exposed to religion, for example, they go to a restaurant, they see, and this happened to me when I was in Colorado, I went to a restaurant, I saw Bible verse, I think Jeremiah 29 verse 11 or something. And then,

[00:12:21] you know, oh, okay, it's like a Christian establishment. But some companies in the US like Forever 21 and also In-N-Out Burger, Hobby Lobby, they are very, very open about what they believe.

[00:13:40] And they do actually print Bible verse in sort of ideological beliefs. Right, and as you mentioned, your own research found that religious priming actually increases negative word of mouth among less religious consumers. So how do we do both? How do we religiously prime the religious without alienating atheists?

[00:15:00] It's very hard to do, especially in a very mixed area where we don't know, we're not sure, you know, what's's better to keep it mainstream so that we don't offend the less religious consumers. Well, marketing technology, though, might help there, should it not? I mean, because what you're talking about, you know, kind of going at religious priming in the religious areas is that model would work very well for very broad, not particularly

[00:16:20] focused ad buys.

[00:16:22] I'm thinking like television, you know. For example, if firms know my religious belief, if something goes wrong, it's a simple email with some religious stimuli like Christmas theme or something or songs. That would induce my mood, right? It would then activate my sort of forgiveness values. So you're right, Todd.

[00:17:40] In a way, with digital segmentation tools that we have right now, it's easier to target who are prime with God may be actually less forgiving in that situation because that failure relates strongly to fairness issues beyond their own interests, you know, in someone else's especially vulnerable community. So the priming can work the other way around. It I found that, yeah, religious people are not always forgiving because it's deep inside. And we found that you need to activate, you need to remind people about their beliefs so that they forgive. It's not something that is automatic.

[00:20:20] Forgiveness is something that needs to be triggered

[00:20:22] among religious people.

[00:20:24] I'm curious to know what made you want to study this.