Gender and education shape how Muslim consumers judge advertising ethics in Nigeria

In the northern Nigerian city of Kano, where Islamic norms strongly shape public morality, researchers have found that who you are determines how offended you are by advertising. A new survey-based study of 291 consumers in the Kano metropolis shows that gender drives ethical judgments about online advertising, while education level drives judgments about offline advertising, with women and more highly educated respondents consistently drawing stricter ethical redlines against nudity and sexism in promotional content.

The study, published in SN Social Sciences by Shafiu Ibrahim Abdullahi of Skyline University Nigeria, Fatma Feyza Gunduz of Adana Alparslan Türkeş Science and Technology University, and Mukhtar Shuaibu of Federal University Birnin Kebbi, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: do gender and education significantly affect consumers’ perceptions of ethical redlines in advertising across media types? To find out, the team administered a structured questionnaire to respondents across the Kano metropolis, a predominantly Muslim urban center of several million people where religious and cultural expectations about modesty, decency, and gender representation are deeply embedded in everyday life.

What makes the study methodologically interesting is the choice of statistical machinery. Rather than treating ethical perception as a simple yes-or-no variable, the researchers employed two complementary econometric models: the Tobit model and ordered multinomial logistic regression. The Tobit model is designed for situations where the dependent variable is censored, meaning that responses cluster at the boundaries of a scale, a common feature when people are asked to rate how unethical something is and many answer at the extremes. Ordered multinomial logistic regression, meanwhile, handles outcome variables that fall into a natural ranking, such as levels of disapproval ranging from mild concern to outright rejection. Using both approaches allowed the team to test whether their findings were robust across different ways of modeling the data.

The results split cleanly along two dimensions. For online advertising, gender emerged as the statistically significant predictor. Women in the sample showed markedly stronger sensitivity to nudity and sexism in digital promotional content than men did. This finding aligns with a substantial body of international research on sex-appeal advertising, which has repeatedly documented that female consumers tend to evaluate sexualized imagery more negatively than male consumers do, partly because such imagery disproportionately objectifies women’s bodies.

For offline advertising, meaning billboards, print materials, and other traditional media encountered in physical space, the picture changed. Here, education level was the statistically significant factor: respondents with higher education expressed stronger rejection of unethical content. The researchers interpret this as evidence that formal schooling sharpens consumers’ capacity to recognize and articulate ethical violations, consistent with earlier studies showing that education shapes attitudes toward business ethics independently of religiosity.

The asymmetry between the two media types is one of the most striking aspects of the study. It suggests that the demographic drivers of moral judgment are not uniform across communication channels. Online advertising, which reaches consumers in more private and personalized contexts, appears to trigger gender-based differences in ethical sensitivity, while offline advertising, which is encountered in shared public spaces where community norms are more visible, appears to activate education-based differences. For advertisers operating in religiously conservative markets, this implies that a single ethical compliance strategy may not suffice across channels.

The study’s setting matters as much as its statistics. Kano is one of the largest cities in West Africa and the cultural heart of Northern Nigeria’s Muslim majority. Advertising ethics research has historically been dominated by Western samples, and scholars have increasingly argued that ethical judgments about commercial persuasion cannot be understood apart from the religious and cultural frameworks in which consumers live. In Islamic ethics, modesty is a positive obligation, and the public display of immodest imagery is not merely a matter of taste but a violation of communal moral standards. The Nigerian study operationalizes this context by measuring perceptions of nudity and sexism specifically, the two categories of content most likely to collide with Islamic norms of dress and gender interaction.

The findings also connect to a broader professional anxiety within the advertising industry itself. Surveys of public trust have repeatedly ranked advertising practitioners near the bottom of honesty and ethics rankings, prompting industry responses such as the creation of ethics institutes and self-regulatory codes. Academic work on advertising ethics has documented persistent tensions between the creative imperative to capture attention, often through sexualized or provocative imagery, and the social responsibility imperative to avoid harm. The Nigerian study adds a religious-consumer perspective to this debate, showing that in some markets the ethical redlines are drawn more tightly and enforced more consistently by the audience than by regulators.

The authors recommend that advertisers adhere to established advertising ethics codes and that immorality in advertisements be minimized in societies sensitive to ethical violations. In practical terms, this means that brands seeking to reach Muslim consumers in Northern Nigeria and comparable markets should treat modesty in visual representation not as a niche accommodation but as a baseline requirement, particularly in digital channels where female consumers, the demographic most sensitive to nudity and sexism in the study, are increasingly active.

Beyond its regional significance, the study contributes to a growing literature on how demographic variables moderate ethical judgment in consumer research. Previous work has examined the roles of religiosity, gender, and education in attitudes toward business ethics across multiple countries, and studies of sex-appeal advertising have documented gender differences in Chinese, European, and American samples. By demonstrating that these variables operate differently across online and offline media in a predominantly Muslim metropolis, the Nigerian researchers add a dimension that much of the existing literature has overlooked: the medium itself. As advertising budgets continue to shift toward digital platforms, understanding how ethical sensitivity varies by channel, gender, and education will become increasingly important for brands, regulators, and researchers alike. The Kano findings suggest that the ethics of advertising are not just a matter of what is shown, but of where, to whom, and through which screen or street it is seen.

Subject of Research: How gender and education influence Muslim consumers' perceptions of nudity and sexism in online and offline advertising in Kano, Nigeria

Article Title: Muslim consumers perception of ethical issues in advertising in Nigeria

Article References: Abdullahi, S. I., Gunduz, F. F., & Shuaibu, M. (2026). Muslim consumers perception of ethical issues in advertising in Nigeria. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 368. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01664-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01664-6

Keywords: advertising ethics, Muslim consumers, Nigeria, gender differences, education, media ethics, Tobit model, ordered logistic regression, Kano, consumer perception, Muslim, consumers