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This paper aims to understand the religio-spiritual insights of the consumers and investigate their relationship with the consumers’ attitude towards advertising and its antecedents. Religious festivals, such as Ramadan, are celebrated with high religio-spiritual contemplations, which are often targeted by intensive marketing campaigns. During these religious festivals, consumers’ attitude toward advertising is influenced when television commercials contain “unnecessary” entertainment, “inappropriate casting” of celebrities with less credibility, “cluttered” information, “phony claims” related to good for economy and “annoying content” increasing consumers’ irritation.

This study developed a higher-order construct of religio-spiritual insights and used “Theory of Reasoned Action” for measuring the effect of religio-spiritual insights on consumers’ attitude toward advertising. Exploratory sequential mixed methods research design was used to develop and validate the instrument. A total of 30 semi-structured interviews were conducted during i-depth analysis phase to generate themes and questionnaire. During instrument validation phase, 839 Muslim consumers were surveyed by using the questionnaire, and instrument was validated by using the co-variance-based structural equation modeling approach.

This study develops and validates the instrument of religio-spiritual insights and identifies its significant direct and mediating effects between the consumer’s attitude toward advertising and its determinants.

The newly developed instrument of religio-spiritual insights is based on six dimensions, namely, “beliefs and practices,” “association with higher power,” “interconnectedness,” “self-actualization,” “heart and mind involvement,” “knowledge and meanings.” This instrument of religio-spiritual insights was validated and then tested by using a conceptual framework based on the several variables, such as attitude toward advertising, irritation, good for economy, entertainment, credibility and information.

This study investigates the effect of total quality management (TQM) on customer satisfaction, personnel satisfaction and company reputation.

The study results rely on a structured survey conducted among an extensive sample of Finnish SMEs. In addition to the examination of the relationship between TQM and company performance in terms of customer satisfaction, personnel satisfaction and company reputation, the study takes a view on the possible effects of the industry, the company size and the certified quality system.

The results reveal that two TQM dimensions, namely Customer Focus and Product Management, were related to companies' customer satisfaction, whereas four TQM dimensions, namely Management/leadership, Customer Focus, Personnel Management and Risk Management, were related to personnel satisfaction. None of the TQM dimensions were related to company reputation. The control variables – the industry, the company size and the certified quality system – were not found to affect customer satisfaction, personnel satisfaction or company reputation.

Most previous studies have been based on traditional TQM classification and have not shown the effects of the latest TQM-related dimensions. Compared to previous studies, this work integrates risk management, digitization, system deployment efficiency and stakeholder management into TQM, which has not been implemented in any previous study. The roles of hard and soft TQM factors have been carefully considered in this study; thus, the study does not place too much emphasis on either direction but provides a balanced picture of the performance of the management systems studied. Although there are studies on the effects of TQM on personnel satisfaction, customer satisfaction and reputation, they are based on a much narrower definition of TQM than that in this study. The business environment is constantly changing, but only a few studies have been conducted to extend the TQM approach. This has led to duplication of studies, and the effects of performance-relevant procedures have not been extensively studied in the past as part of TQM. Therefore, the concept of this study brings significant added value to TQM research and returns the TQM concept to the overall level while considering the requirements of the ISO 9001: 2015 and EFQM 2019 quality standards. The study also considers the effects of ISO 9001 certification and EFQM requirements.