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The purpose of this paper is to establish whether Muslim consumers qualify as a homogenous billion-consumer group and, if they do, ask if they have been researched adequately in comparison to the other established, three-billion consumer groups: China, India, and women.

A review of articles and conference papers in the field of Islamic marketing was used to indicate the homogeneity or heterogeneity of the Muslim consumer group. This was followed by counting all of the articles that have been published in marketing journals listed in Business Source Premier database which are related to the consumer groups mentioned above.

The article review revealed a near consensus on the homogeneity of the Muslim consumer group. Moreover, the article count revealed that the Muslim consumer segment is under-researched in comparison to all the other major consumer groups. Finally, it was found that only six of the high-ranking Marketing journals ranked within the top ten marketing journals published articles on one or more of the four segments identified in this study. The leading journals were clearly the Journal of International Marketing and the Journal of Industrial Marketing Management, publishing 50 and 49 articles, respectively, a number unmatched by any other high-ranking journal.

This is the first study of its kind that presents empirical evidence about the amount of research Muslim consumers received within the last eight decades.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new method to assess trade name distinctiveness.

The authors implemented a two‐staged methodology. First, catchwords in trade names in the relevant database were identified and ranked according to how commonly they were used and, second, these names were classified into four distinct categories using clearly‐defined criteria based on their degree of similarity: champions (zero similarity), runners‐up (low similarity), wannabes (high similarity), and washouts (extreme similarity).

The proposed assessment method allows entrepreneurs to create names that are dissimilar to existing ones and hence support a company's later activities designed to enhance the reputation of the name and build brand equity. The scale is applicable in various business sectors.

The study is limited by: the number of names compared being relatively small, the terminology used to denominate the various scale levels could be revisited and other denominations might better reflect the levels. Due to its pioneering nature, the adopted approach needs to be validated by further studies, in particular, how does one assess whether the method is working adequately and, because the scale focuses on one attribute of the name, i.e. distinctiveness, other relevant attributes are not taken into consideration. The trade‐off between the various attributes was not within the scope of this study.

This is the only study in the field that provides a practical method for assessing trade name distinctiveness through providing actual examples of the possibility of name confusion or differentiation. The study also introduces new concepts for naming strategies such as catch words, trade name distinctiveness, distinctiveness scale, and the similarity indicator. Moreover, the study provides a new classification of characteristics of names that should or should not be used.