Religion as a field of transcultural practices in multicultural marketplaces

This paper reframes the dominant marketing conceptualization of religion as a driver of consumer differences toward religion as a field of transcultural practices within multicultural marketplaces. Through depth interviews with 24 consumers from multiple religious backgrounds and multiple Southeast Asian nations living in New Zealand, we demonstrate how divergent religious communities facilitate five key transcultural consumption practices. Our paper makes two contributions to the literature on religion and marketing. First, we highlight the role that religion plays in facilitating entry into and mutual entanglement within multicultural marketplaces. Second, in addition to the present focus on how religion produces differences in marketplace behaviors, we underline the transcultural properties of religion which are shared across diverse religious traditions. This study demonstrates how religion can perform an important role in facilitating the transcultural character of contemporary multicultural marketplaces, offering novel implications about how managers should engage with consumers in these markets.