While there has been substantial research done on the topic of halal consumption behavior from an economic perspective, there is no research available from a sociological perspective that studies the halal consumption behavior of Muslims who may perhaps conspicuously indulge in halal certified products. This thesis argues that consumers may need to demonstrate their association with their religion to some extent by their consumption choices. And, a product’s Islamic brand image helps consumers to display their Muslim piety in their groups or communities. As in today’s consumer society a halal logo is representative of an Islamic brand and Muslims may prefer a product with halal logo for its religious connotations or values. In the process of halalaisation,commodities transform to non-commodities as they are thereby linked to the religious domain. Our research seeks to examine the effects of the halalisation phenomenon on the person’s Muslim piety and their transcendental wellbeing by using online surveys and in-depth interviews with Australian Muslims with a mixed method approach. The inter-view data was transcribed into electronic format to combine and compare the responses and, analysed for themes that guided the proposed conceptual model which was underpinned by the renowned sociological theories (theory of conspicuous consumption, the rational choice theory of religion and the self-transcendence theory). The conceptual model hypothesized that consumer’s perceived public image of halal products will positively relate to their Muslim piety. And, the consumer’s Muslim piety will strengthen their preference for halal products which may positively correlate with consumer’s transcendental wellbeing. The quantitative data was prepared using the statistical software SPSS. Further, the data analysis was conducted following the two-step approach to Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). In this approach, the measurement scales of the constructs in the model were first subjected to Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), and then the structure model was assessed to show hypothesized relationships among key constructs by using the statistical software AMOS. The result shows that the pro-posed hypotheses were accepted. That is, consumer’s perceived public image of halal products has a positive influence on the Muslim piety. Besides, the Muslim piety strongly related to their preference for halal products which contributes to consumer’s transcendental wellbeing. Over-all, the empirical evidence suggests that halalised products can be conspicuously consumed and more importantly, contributes towards Muslim piety and transcendental wellbeing.
The limitation of the study is that the conceptual model developed to test the relationships between consumer’s perceived public image of halal products and its impact on their Muslim piety and transcendental wellbeing was only tested in a Muslim context with widely accepted scales used to measure all the variables of the model. This limits the findings to Muslims; otherwise the model could be employed to other religions to assess consumer preference for products with religious orientations and consumer’s transcendental wellbeing
