The Marketing of Sacred Goods

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the marketing of religious goods. In particular, we consider the activities of both consumers and retailers at the time of pilgrimage to saints' tombs. Unlike most consumer goods, the meaning attributed to religious goods, or the process by which goods acquire sacred meaning, involves not only the good or the context, but also the marketers themselves. The marketers' mediation process is intended to embed authenticity into the products or services they market; this authenticity is monotonically related to the retailer's proximity to the consumer's cultural world. Our conclusions suggest five different strategies of meaning transfer that retailers can adopt.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.