Volume XXXV • Number 2 • February 2005

Scope of Marketing in Healthcare Sector

Today focus on marketing is intensifying in various sectors whether it is consumer, business, international or non profit. More and more organizations in these sectors recognize how marketing can attribute to improve the performance.
Marketing is increasingly attracting the interest of non-profit organizations such as educational, healthcare, religious, charity foundations; entertainment etc.The provision of healthcare services is a major constituent of the non-profit sector. With global revenues of approximately US$ 2.8 trillion, the healthcare industry is the world’s largest industry and India is emerging as a major player in this industry, because of its high population. India spends over Rs.1,03,000 crore on healthcare, of which delivery market consumes Rs.86,000 crore, while the rest goes to the pharma market. The industry is expected to grow at the rate of 13 percent for the next six years which amounts to an addition of Rs.9000 crores each year.

Dr. Sita Mishra
Lecturer
Asia Pacific Institute of Management
New Delhi

Preference in Cellular Service Providers in the Post Liberalization Era

The emergence of marketing concept in respect of services is a recent phenomenon. Let’s produce, what the producer thinks; the market wants, the sales department will manage to sell. This was the focus prior to the beginning of the marketing concept in the context of selling the services. The end of the decade 1950’spaved avenues for service marketing as users’ satisfaction received due weightage.It is very difficult to predict and understand users behavior obviously it becomes important for every service sector to concentrate on users and their behavior.

Ms. S. Revathy
Lecturer (SS) in Commerce
K.N. Govt Arts College (Women)
Thanjavur
Tamil Nadu

Dr. S. Padmavathy
Reader in Economics
K.N. Govt Arts College (Women)
Thanjavur
Tamil Nadu

Branding J & K Herbaceous Wealth

A marketer is continually reminded of the need for product differentiation by building strong brand identities and decries imitation Brand building and its monitoring builds loyal customers willing to pay more for a brand that no alternative can provide. It confers certain marketing advantage such as reduced marketing costs, more new customers, greater trade leverage and other loyalty related marketing advantages, such as favorable word of mouth and greater resistance among loyal consumers to competitive strategies .Branding besides serving associative cues for information retrieval, serve as predictive cues about product performance. Consumers satisfied with a certain brand are unlikely to discontinue the brand choice unless the price differential covers the thinking costs as defined by Shugan. Similarly, Assael (1987) describes that prior satisfaction with a brand leads to repeat purchase which in turn accelerate habitual buying. Research studies have shown that ownership of brands of more inundane products provides valued bridges to family, friends, or neighbors.

Dr. Neetu Andotra
Reader
Department of Commerce
University of Jammu
Jammu

A Case of Emotional Decision Making [EDM]

In the 20th century, for the first time in human history, a society gave birth to feminism and woman’s liberation.UN reports on women show that, women make up half of the total world population and contribute 2/3rd of the work hours and yet receive only 1/10th of the world income and own less than 1/100th of the world property. The role of this same woman has undergone a sea change in the family also. This change can be attributed to changing lifestyles, invasion of television channels and aping of the western culture. The traditional family set up is soon giving way, with the husband, wife and children stepping into each other’s shoes with ease.

T. Bina
Senior Faculty
School of Management
VLB Janakiamal College of Engineering & Technology
Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu

Content Analysis of Comparative Advertisements

Comparative Advertisement is a form of advertising in which two or more named, recognizable brands of the same product class are compared and the comparison is made in terms of one or more attributes.
In USA, the use of comparative advertising was made legal in 1971, when Federal Trade Commission not only legalized it, but also encouraged advertisers to provide more comparative information (to enable consumers to take better decisions) through the use of such advertisements. Since then, advertisements with comparative format have been increasingly used and their effectiveness as compared to the non comparative advertisements has also been extensively researched. Other aspects like the ethicality of advertisements with such format; the views of the advertisers, advertisement agencies, consumers and regulators have also been topics of interest for researchers.

Sukanya Ashok Kumar
Faculty, Sona School of Management
Sona College of Technology
Salem, Tamil Nadu

Effectiveness of Sachets in Modifying Rural Consumers’ Buying Behavior and Their Consumption Pattern- A
Researcher’s View

The recent news from boardrooms of all companies ranging from cars to shampoos, are chanting only one ‘mantra’, how to focus and woo rural consumers to buy products/services?. In recent days, rural India has been witnessing a sea change in all aspects, needless to say the increase of standard of living and catching up with new life styles. Thanks to private satellite channels, they bring the world courtyards of many village houses. This created a tremendous modification in the behavior of rural consumers. Also, many rural youth usually go out of their places for higher education, which proves to be a leverage to face new life styles in semi-urban and metros. Many companies like Hindustan Lever Limited already made inroads into rural areas to establish their markets and fairly succeeded in their efforts. Hindustan Lever Limited created a group called ‘Self Help Group’. The main motto of the group is to identify unemployed educated youths and housewives from different villages and provide them a small fund to setup shops in front of their houses to sell products (mainly from HLL).It serves a dual purpose of developing entrepreneurship in rural markets areas and to promote HLL products as well. Not only FMCG’s but many consumer durable companies found rural markets very potential and made inroads into this lucrative market. This vividly shows the potential of rural markets that were long neglected which now came into limelight with a force to reckon with.Hence, rural marketing finds a prominent place in every company’s marketing map and everyone wants to have a competitive edge in this arena. This paper was mainly developed on the basis of the primary survey conducted among the rural consumers in certain parts of Karnataka to analyze the role of FMCG products (in sachets) in boosting rural consumers’ consumption pattern and the modification of their buying behavior.

A.M. Sakkthivel
Faculty-Marketing-Area
Department of Management Studies
PES Institute of Technology
Bangalore

Dr. Bishnupriya Mishra
Reader
Regional College of Management
Bhubaneswar