Pakistani students shine at Global Islamic Marketing Conference

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LAHORE – A paper titled ‘Barriers to Islamic Banking in Pakistan’ presented by 5 undergraduate students Hassan Ahmed, Nausherwan Saleem, Khawaja Jaffer Abbas, Muzammil Altaf Barkhurdaria and Jawad Mehmood from the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) received the best student paper award at the Global Islamic Marketing Conference held in Dubai, UAE in March, 2011.
The conference, sponsored by The United Arab Emirates University and Emerald Group Publishing, was attended by academics from over forty countries. The students competed against Masters and PhD students from around the world for this award. They were the youngest presenters at the conference and received tremendous accolades from the participants for such an achievement at the undergraduate level, which is very rare.
Their paper will be published in the next issue of Journal of Islamic Marketing, a publication of Emerald Group Publishing. The research paper reported findings of a pilot study conducted in Lahore and asked banking customers the barriers they face when choosing Islamic banks as opposed to conventional banks. The study highlighted Islamic banks’ limited branch network and customers’ perception that Islamic banks are not following Islamic principles as the main barriers faced by customers towards using Islamic banking services.
“Our research provides valuable insights about how the banking customer perceives Islamic banks to be. And hence, it can enable Islamic banks to develop marketing and operational strategies to specifically address those barriers which consumers actually face”, said one of the authors.

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5 COMMENTS

  1. 'The study highlighted Islamic banks' limited branch network and customers' perception that Islamic banks are not following Islamic principles as the main barriers faced by customers towards using Islamic banking services. "Our research provides valuable insights about how the banking customer perceives Islamic banks to be. And hence, it can enable Islamic banks to develop marketing and operational strategies to specifically address those barriers which consumers actually face", said one of the authors.'

    Why are you calling your findings 'perception'? Many credible Ulema from different fiqh, and different parts of the world have concluded that the Islamic banks are not following Islamic principles. Rather than addressing 'the' problem, you are suggesting bankers to develop marketing strategies to alter customer percpetions and more proactively brand their offerings as Islamic.

    This also raises the question, 'does it make any sense to coneptualize something as 'Islamic Marketing.'' With such a mental model, it is almost impossible to do something that is geniunely Islamic, whether it's Islamic Banking or Islamic 'Hijjab'.

  3. This book might shed fresh light to this matter.
    Economics Of An Islamic Economy
    Rauf A. Azhar (Author)
    Published By: Brill Academic Publishers

  4. The idea in the paper was to develop operational strategies to bring it more in line with Islamic principles and once that has been achieved, to market those to create the awareness that these banks follow Islamic principles. Please avoid making snap judgements without reading the whole text!

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