The effect of Islamic values on relational marketing basics

Article history: Received October 1, 2011 Received in Revised form November, 14, 2011 Accepted 15 December 2011 Available online 21 December 2011 In this paper, we present an empirical study to measure the relationship between Islamic values and marketing affairs in the field of alimentary industries of West Azarbaijan province, Iran. The proposed study distributes a questionnaire among 105 managers out of 145 ones and analyzes the data using different statistical methods such as linear regression analysis. The preliminary results indicate that Islamic values significantly influence trust, commitment and communication among members of business units and it could help resolve conflict management, substantially. The paper provides some guidelines for better managing firms in the region by attaching on Islamic values for marketing products and preventing unethical methods in mislead customers. © 2012 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


Introduction
During the past few years, there have been growing interests on executing Islamic rules for different companies such as banks, insurance companies, etc. (Hunt & Vitell, 1986;Ahmad, 2000;Ahmad, & Haron, 2002).Al-Khater and Naser (2003) discussed the importance of honoring ethical rules in organization to increase customers' trust and feeling towards firms.Dsuki and Abdollah (2006) investigated some important factors, which motivate customers to deal with Islamic banks specifically in a dual banking environment exists in some countries such as Malaysia.They also investigated some important factors associated with corporate social responsibility as a necessary element of potential customers' banking selection criteria.The study disclosed that the selection of Islamic banks is a combination of Islamic and financial reputation and quality service offered by the bank.
There are also other important factors including good social responsibility practices, convenience and product price.Wilson (1997) presented a comprehensive study on Islamic finance and ethical investment.Arslan (2001) discussed influencing moral issues affecting the success of business in different countries.Lund (2000) performed an empirical examination of marketing professionals' ethical behavior in differing situations.Ndubisi (2007) performed a comprehensive study on relationship marketing and customer loyalty.Morgan and Hunt (1994) presented a comprehensive study on the relationship between the components of commitment and trust using theory of relationship marketing.Othman and Owen (2001) proposed a method for adopting and measuring customer service quality in Islamic banks.They investigated their studies for a case study in Kuwait finance house and analyzed their results.Porter and Kramer (2002) presented a detailed discussion on the competitive advantage of corporate philanthropy.
The organization of this paper investigates the impact of Islamic rules and regulation on other factors such as trust, loyalty, etc.The organization of this paper first presents details of the survey and sampling as well as definitions of hypotheses in section 2. Section 3 presents details of finding and finally concluding remarks are given in the last to summarize the contribution of the paper.

Research methodology
The empirical study of this paper has been implemented among the managers of 145 people of West Azarbaijan alimentary.In order to select statistical sample from community, classified random sampling has been used.Therefore, we could use the following formula to calculate the minimum number of sample size, where N is the population size, and N=145, the number of sample size is calculated as n=105.In our sampling, first community has been divided into 14 towns and after calculating the shares of every town in sample, the determined number of statuses were selected from every class, through random simple sampling, which are shown on Table 1.For data gathering, there were two segment questionnaires.First segment includes relational marketing basics questions with 47 questions and second segment includes 13 questions of Islamic values have been arranged and have been used.Table 2 shows details of our questions and their titles.Islamic values are effective on conflict management dimension of basics of relational marketing.

Results
In order to analyze the collected data from questionnaires, we have used descriptive and deductive statistical methods.Table 3 shows detailed characteristics of the survey participants in terms of their gender.Based on the information of Table 5, the average of the sixth item, Islamic values, is 36.19 also average of basics of relational marketing, trust, commitment and conflict management are 137.89, 35.54, 11.63, 30.37, and 34.60, respectively.Table 6 shows details of Pearson's test (Norusis, 2004) to examine the correlation on basics of relational marketing and its dimensions.According to calculated information from  Therefore, there is a meaningful relation between Islamic values and basics of relational marketing and its four dimensions, which are trust, commitment, communications and conflict management in West Azarbaijan alimentary industries.In addition, for evaluation of effectiveness of independent variable on dependent variable of all hypothesis two variable regressions is used and the results are summarized in Table 7. the products.Marketing development needs to be on Islamic rules, which includes ongoing relationships with customers, detecting customers' need and informing them about the new products and maintaining on time services.Pricing is another issue associated with the product and it must be according to product characteristics.Firms do not have to charge for low quality products, they do not have to mislead customers to purchase products; they do not have discriminate customers.Quality is a priority according to Islamic rules and firms must comply with highest levels of quality.Customer relationship management must also be based on Islamic rules, employees need to have outstanding relationship with their customers according to Islamic rules and regulation and customers must be treated with respect.

Conclusions
In this paper, we have presented an empirical study to investigate the relationship between Islamic values and marketing affairs in the field of alimentary industries of West Azarbaijan province, Iran.
The proposed study designed a questionnaire and distributed among 105 managers out of 145 ones and analyzed the data using different statistical methods.The preliminary results indicated that Islamic values significantly influence trust, commitment and communication among members of business units and it could help resolve conflict management, substantially.The paper provided some guidelines for better managing firms in the region by attaching on Islamic values for marketing products and preventing unethical methods in mislead customers.

Table 1
Number of statistical community and sample by town division

Table 2
Relational marketing dimensions and number of related questions of every element in questionnaire CronbachAlpha (1951)method has been used for perpetuity calculation with SPSS software and it was 0.936 for relational marketing basics questions and was 0.921 for Islamic values questions.Value of this statistic states that first, questionnaire has high coherency second that it has high perpetuity.Cronbach Alpha was calculated as 0.936 for perpetuity of relational marketing basics questions.Cronbach Alpha is also calculated as 0.921 for Perpetuity of Islamic values questions.

Table 5
Descriptive statistics of research variables

Table 6 ,
Pearson's test meaningfully level is 0.001 and P=0.000 for all of hypothesis at one scope meaningfully level.This is lower than minimum level of meaningfully i.e.
0.05.Calculated values for hypothesis numbers 1 to 1-4 are 0.650, 0.540, 0.570, 0.532 and 0.670, respectively.Therefore, these are higher than 0.174 critical value of Pearson's at confidential level of 0.95 and freedom grade of 104.

Table 6
Pearson's test for the determining of Islamic values correlation on basics of relational marketing and

Table 7
Variant analyze of regression model of Islamic values on basics of relational marketing related hypothesis