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Spiritual journey to Hajj: Australian and Pakistani experience and expectations

This paper explores and examines the interesting and important phenomenon of Hajj from a marketing strategy and ethnographic perspective. There has been little academic qualitative research from a marketing strategy perspective on Hajj (once a year Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca), examining the perceptions of Muslims going on this significant spiritual journey. This paper also attempts to contribute to the theory on spiritual tourism and journeys and the marketing of spiritual tourism, by focusing on Hajj as both an outstanding spiritual journey and a product/service. This paper is part of a wider research project conducted to study marketing strategies in spiritual tourism, and focuses on the outbound markets of Australia and Pakistan. The paper presents a qualitative study of the perceptions and attitudes of Muslims towards their journey of Hajj; the investigation is carried out from the perspective of two different and parallel cultures, i.e. Muslim Australians and Muslim Pakistanis. In order to gain a comparative perspective, this study concentrates on the attitudes of Pakistani Muslims residing in Pakistan and in Australia. The social surrounds of the two populations are further described within the contexts of East/West, individualism/collectivism, and free criticism/authority acceptance. The findings of the research were further dissected and analysed to segment the customers of Hajj and to propose more effective marketing strategies for Hajj in Australia and Pakistan. It was found that the use of modern marketing concepts and tools was very helpful in giving a better perspective of the enormous business aspects of Hajj.