Volume XXXVII • Number  10 • October 2007

Is Everything Fair In Marketing?(Unravelling the Knitty-Gritty of Ambush Marketing with Special Reference to India)

Aditya Prakash Tripathi
Lecturer in Management
Department of Management Studies
Delhi School of Professional Studies & Research
Delhi

Cause Related Marketing

“Cause related marketing is the action through which a company, a non-profit organization, or a similar entity markets on image, a product, a service, or a message for mutual benefit (of the entity and the cause)”1 Cause-related marketing gives the value of brand image, corporate reputation, satisfaction etc. Social investors stands to gain from a better understanding of cause marketing because that understanding could help them better evaluate whether that company is doing an effective job in differentiating itself.
Cause-related marketing (CRM) is marketing strategy-linking purchases of a product with fundraising for a worthwhile charity, project, or cause. Cause related marketing creates a mutually profitable outcome for the business and charity. Cause marketing can be a highly effective method that contributes to building a positive image for the business, while helping a charity gain much needed visibility.

Dr.Devendra Prasad Pandey
Principal
St.Soldier Management & Technical
Institute,Jalandhar,Punjab

Buyers Perception Towards Prawn Feed - A Study In West Godavari District, Andhra Pradesh

In recent years, there has been considerable discussion about the ‘marketing revolution’ and it centers around the need for modern marketing to be consumer oriented, to be concerned with the needs and wishes of the consumer. There are a number of reasons why the study of consumer behavior developed as a separate marketing discipline. Consumers are often studied because certain decisions are significantly affected by their behavior or expected actions. For this reason, consumer behavior is said to be an applied discipline. Such applications are said to exist at two different levels of analysis, the micro perspective and the societal perspective. The West Godavari District is the king pin of Aquaculture in Andhra Pradesh. Fish and Prawn farming has shown a spectacular growth in the area. Prawn culture has attracted more number of farmers with heavy investments in the rural Coastal belt, bringing a major up gradation in the rural economy of the area. The growth of prawn culture has received major set back due to lack of proper technical know how in feeding. Due to lack of technical and scientific knowledge farmers in this region are unable to take right decision at the time of choosing a particular brand of prawn feed. In this context an attempt has been made to study and examine the buyers/farmers preferences towards prawn feed in the district of West Godavari, Andhra Pradesh.

Dr.B.V.R.Naidu
Associate Professor
Department of Management Studies
Sri Y.N. College
Narsapur,Andhra Pradesh

Prospects and Problems of Indian Retailing

Retail environment in India has evolved tremendously over the last 10 years. India is currently the ninth largest retail market in the world. And it is names of small towns like Dehradun, Vijaywada, Lucknow and Nasik that will power India up the rankings soon. With the emergence of organized retailing in the country and a growing convenience, retailing has emerged, as a key business, given their wide retail presence, exists customer base and strategically located sites. Even though India has well over 5 million retail outlets of all sizes and styles, the country sorely lacks anything that can resemble a retailing industry in the modern sense of term. Indian retailing though enjoys many unique features is still done in a primitive way, they were handicapped by higher taxes, multiple laws, wrong policy decisions, unnecessary/illegal imports, poor infrastructure and logistics, high cost of equipment and packing material. So in this paper an attempt has been made to discuss the current prospects and problems of retailing in India.

Amatul Baseer
Faculty of Commerce
Osmania University Post Graduate College,Nalgonda, Andhra Pradesh

G.Laxmi Prabha
Faculty of Business Management
Osmania University Post Graduate College
Nalgonda, Andhra Pradesh

Small Vs Mall

The mall culture is catching up gradually in twin cities with several malls making their entry in Hyderabad retail sector. These malls have given a new dimension to shopping experience. Malls have transformed once compulsive and sober shopping into a family entertainment and as a weekend pastime. With the entire products available under one complex, offering rich and pleasant ambience, stocking and offering cornucopia of products and brands, these malls have already bagged a major chunk of existing retail market share.

Dr.C.V.Ranjani
Asst.Professor
Badruka College Post Graduate Centre
Hyderabad

Customer Segment Research and Its Role in Designing Sales Promotion Programme For Small Car Industry in India

The paper tries to associate the significance of information generated by the customer segment research to the help, which it can extend in designing the sales promotion programme and related tools and strategy. The fundamentals of the paper are based on the customer survey conducted over 434 potential buyers of small car, identified in the population on basis of probability sampling. In the analytical approach to utilise the information thus generated through the customer research, few assumptions are taken into account with reference to family life cycle and related aspects. Further on in the paper the features are mapped to the preference sets of the customer segment zeroing to ‘highest potential buyer group’ in the targeted population. The resultant is associated with types of sales promotion tools and strategy that can induce a favourable purchase decision. The paper utilises Set Theory to an extent to determine overlapping and converging areas of interest in the customer preference set.

Dr.Madhvendra Misra
Lecturer
Indian Institute of Information Technology
Allahabad,Uttar Pradesh
madhvendra@iiita.ac.in

Contemporary Issues in Services Marketing

Recently, India has got recognition among the major economies of the world. It has been ranked the fourth economic power in the world after the USA, China and Japan. L.N.Mittal, Britain’s richest man and chairman of Arcelor Mittal, the world’s largest steel company said, “At present, no corporate or board meeting anywhere in the world is complete without India being discussed”. 

Interestingly, there is a significant contribution of services in the economic growth story of India.

There has been a fundamental shift in the India’s commercial dealings with the outside world. India has emerged as the fastest growing nation in the global services trade with the jump of 34% in the exports of services in 2006.

Ranked at the 12th position, the country’s services exports totaled $73 billion while imports were $70 billion in 2006 according to World Trade Organisation - WTO report.

Looking at the contribution of services in most of the economies in the world, the time has come when marketers should make themselves familiarize with contemporary issues in the areas of services marketing for the better economical growth of their country and their own organizations.

Prof.(Dr.) Anil Sarin
Professor & Director
International MERFS
Faridabad

anilsarin@rediffmail.com

Strategic Factors Affecting Investment Decisions of MNCs

IThe factors that MNCs study before choosing a particular country for exploration, has undergone extensive research. Still it is felt that there is no exhaustive list of factors, which a corporation must study before choosing a particular market. The present conceptual paper is an attempt to provide a fairly reasonable set of factors which need careful scrutiny before embarking upon cross border operations. The size of the prospective market is perhaps the most important decision as regards investment in an alien market. Closely follows the issue of culture. Needs, that are the basic human requirements, ought to be the same in different countries & cultures but the means of satisfying those needs differ across culture. The availability of skilled & qualified workforce at the local level is a major motivating factor for MNCs.Apart from the tax structure, another factor that attracts FDI to a particular country is the incentives that the country offers to foreign direct investment. The existence of government bodies which regulate the flow & facilitate the process of investment in a particular country are also an important factor. Many of the issues are so intertwined that the study of one automatically leads to study of the other. 

Ankit Sarin
Jeevandeep Institute of Management
Varanasi

sarinanku13@rediffmail.com

Syed Ali Arshad
Lecturer
School of Management Sciences
Varanasi

System Training Services Provided by 'Training Service Providers' and 'In-House Trainers'-Organizational Consumers' Perception about Service Attributes

Computerization has gained greater significance in various organizations in India. System products providing information solutions are being procured from system sellers or developed in-house by the Electronic Data Processing (EDP)/Information Technology (IT) department of the organizations. System users in various departments are trained by the system sellers (training service providers) or by the EDP/IT department (in-house trainers). This papers analyses the organizational consumers' (system users') perception about various attributes related to training services received by various organizations in Hyderabad. Factor analysis has been applied to identify the predominant factors that are to be considered by the training service providers for designing training services and delivering training to the organizational users.

Dr.S.K.G. Ganesh
Assistant Professor
BSA Crescent Engineering College
Chennai

Dr.M.S.Bhat
Professor
School of Management Studies
Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University
Hyderabad

Dr.R.B.Kumar
Retd. Professor of Management
Anna University
Chennai