Religion, spirituality, and advertising

This article introduces the special section on Religion, Spirituality, and Advertising. A person’s belief in a religion or their spiritual identity can have a direct influence on the way they live and their attitudes and values. This can also impact an individual’s perception toward an advertiser’s message and images or advertising in general. While studies on the topic of religion and spirituality in the marketing literature are on the rise, there is still a substantive research gap on this topic, particularly on the theoretical and empirical developments pertaining to the influence of religion on various aspects of advertising topics. For this special section, the Call for Papers resulted in 37 submissions, which finally resulted in five articles that present a different focus on the topic and aim to encourage new discourse into the area of religion, spirituality, and advertising.