Editorial

Citation

Alserhan, B.A. (2010), "Editorial", Journal of Islamic Marketing, Vol. 1 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/jima.2010.43201caa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Islamic Marketing, Volume 1, Issue 3

Welcome to the third issue of the Journal of Islamic Marketing. As usual, our audience is guaranteed a thrilling experience that will take them this time to Arabia in the Middle East, Persia in Central Eurasia and Western Asia, Malaysia in Southeast Asia, and deep into Francophone West Africa. The journal’s promise of blending the academic, theoretical, and intellectual with the marketplace realties is fulfilled through the choice of articles, reviews, and a complementary interview that constitute the contents of this issue.

This issue comes with a special African flavor. The continent, which has so far flown under the radar of academic researchers, takes a front seat with three papers covering Tunisia, Ghana, Guinea and Senegal. Stephen Wood’s paper on the economic status of pious Muslims in Francophone West Africa is a true eye opener for researchers. His paper introduces a new subject matter which future researchers could investigate further in other Muslim countries and communities, among adherents of other religions, and comparatively between Muslim and non-Muslim societies. Related questions to this paper include: what is it that makes the pious Muslims better off economically than the non-pious? Is this typical only within Muslim societies or does it apply elsewhere? What are its causes, are they religious, political, environmental, etc? Wood’s passionate, yet scholarly analysis on the Pula Futa of northern Guinea and the Mourides of Senegal is one of the best works ever written, not only on these two Muslim groups, but on the relationship between piousness and wealth.

Staying in Africa, Jibrail Bin Yusuf examines sales promotional practices in Ghana, weighing their ethical implications from an Islamic perspective to determine whether they meet Islam’s ethical requirements to merit Muslims’ patronage. He concludes that the current Ghanaian promotional strategies are ethically questionable. They lead to unethical earning of livelihood and unjust acquisition of wealth through gambling and other ill-perceived means which do not promote the ethical values of Muslims. The author highlights the need for further research into the ethical dimensions of business practices in Ghana with the aim of promoting ethical responsibility within the society.

The last paper from Africa is by Azza Frikha who examines the behavior of Muslim Tunisian spouses as they buy furniture for their homes. She explores the conflict resolution strategies they adopted and examines the determinants of the variation in these strategies. Her findings suggest that conflicts are more marked with regard to the non aesthetic aspects of the furniture and show that the variations in strategies of conflict resolution used by spouses depend on gender role orientation, family life cycle, and the socio-demographic characteristics.

Moving to Persia, Tooraj Sadeghi and Kambiz Heidarzadeh Hanzaee investigate the main factors underlying customer satisfaction with electronic banking services in Iran as an Islamic country. The model they construct for evaluating customer satisfaction is based on different service quality models and theories such as technology acceptance model (TAM), theory of reasoned action (TRA), and theory of planned behavior (TPB). Their findings show that there are significant statistical difference between Iranian males and females on some of the seven factors which constituted their model, i.e. convenience, accessibility, accuracy, security, usefulness, bank image and web site design.

From Arabia, Matt Elbeck and Evangellos-Vagelis Dedoussis thoroughly analyze the Arabian Gulf innovator attitudes for online Islamic bank marketing strategy. Their ten-year replication study reveals increased internet and online bank usage, higher household incomes and concerns about security (fraud, theft and hacking). The study also finds that Criteria describing an online Islamic bank are vague and do not strongly reflect Sharia. The authors suggest that online Islamic banking has matured wherein examination of adopter categories beyond the innovator group together with customer transaction data can help establish the relationships between attitude, intentions and behavior and therefore offer bankers additional insights in the development of online Islamic bank segmentation and marketing strategy.

From Peninsular Malaysia, Kalthom Abdullah and Mohammad Ismail’s study explores the perceptions of Muslim consumers of the degree of compliance of Malaysian businesses to Islamic marketing practices and promotional strategies through analyzing the responses of 450 Muslim respondents residing in major Malaysian towns. Their findings suggest that not many businesses in Malaysia are perceived to be complying with the general Islamic and promotional practices. Such a result might come as a surprise to many since Malaysia is seen as a leading country in the Halal standardization and certification movement.

Finally, other key component of this issue include an interview with Tanya Dernaika, the Strategic Planning Director at Memac Ogilvy and Mather, Dubai, a critical review by Bassam Abdul-Rahim of Mohammad Saeed, Zafar Ahmed, and Syeda-Masooda Mukhtar’s paper “International marketing ethics from an Islamic perspective: a value-maximization approach”, and an outstanding review by Nadia Shuayto of John Quelch’s best seller book “Cases in Strategic Marketing Management: Business Strategies in Muslim Countries”.

Bakr Ahmad Alserhan