Brand Reliance and Religiosity

Excerpt from FastCompany Apple Logo Is an Agnostic's Crucifix, Star of David:  Study

Researchers at Duke ran several experiments to determine this disconnection between brand importance and religiosity. In one, the team analyzed geographic areas for the number of Apple, Macy's, and Gap stores per million people. These statistics were compared with brand-discount stores. "Then they compared these rough measures of brand reliance against the number of congregations per thousand and self-reported attendance in church or synagogue, controlling for income, education and urbanization differences," the report says. "In every analysis, they found a negative relationship between brand reliance and religiosity."

In another experiment, a group of students were asked to write an essay on "what your religion means to you personally." A second set of students wrote essays on an unrelated topic. Both groups then underwent an imaginary shopping trip, where they were asked to choose between a series of products. A similar online experiment was conducted with hundreds of participants, divided between those who reported being religious and those who did not. In both cases, "those that were highly religious [or primed to think about religion] cared less about national brands ... religion reduces brand reliance by apparently satisfying the need to express self-worth."

While this perhaps finally solves the mystery of why Christopher Hitchens and Nietzsche were such label whores, it also provides insight into how certain brands--namely Apple--develop cult-like followings. Similar to Duke's report, brand expert Martin Lindstrom conducted a 3 year, 7 million dollar study comparing brain scans of the religious to those with high brand loyalty. Lindstrom discovered that the scans of people loyal to Apple matched the scans of devoted Christians.