Marketing for Happiness

Hanson Dionne Sara and Arjoon Surendra

The link between marketing and happiness is not a common one, though there has been some recent research that attempts to explore and establish this link. Indeed, one does not normally associate marketing with happiness. Marketing theory and practice have evolved from its initial focus on competition and performance to customer satisfaction and now to consumer well-being. This study explores happiness (consumer or subjective well-being) and related concepts as they relate to marketing. It is grounded in the ethical foundations of well-being marketing as developed by Sirgy and Lee45. Well-being marketing is a business philosophy with has as its goal consumer well-being or happiness. The study takes an exploratory approach to understanding the links that consumers make between marketing efforts and practice and their own happiness. A qualitative research methodology allowed for an open investigative approach into an under-researched area of marketing inquiry. It is hoped that the findings of the current research will stimulate deeper investigations into this area.

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A Strategic Framework for managing Higher Educational Institutions

Umayal Karpagam P.L. and Suganthi L.

Education helps to enhance the knowledge base of the nation and therefore plays a vital role in shaping the future of the nation. Emerging global trends, new economic challenges and the rapid growth of information technology has placed higher education in a much sharper focus and hence its performance assessment becomes essential. The purpose of this paper is to present a model for measuring performance of an educational institution based on the balanced scorecard (BSC) approach. To accomplish this, it is essential to be familiar with the required qualitative characteristics of graduates to compete with local and/or global markets. Till now various models with different approaches to strategic positioning are deployed in defining strategic position. The literature suggests that balanced scorecard is the most appropriate management system to assess the performance and is best suited to support the present requirement for educational institutions which provides balanced information from all possible contributing areas and also allows the alignment of wide variety of parameters with the unique strategy and mission of the institution. The goals and measures have been identified and presented for a generic balanced scorecard model for assessing the performance of educational institutions. Measurement criteria’s’ are also suggested to assess the performance based on the four perspectives of balanced scorecard. Any of the advanced techniques like analytical hierarchy process (AHP) could be integrated with BSC for framing the causal relationships among the indicators. The framework developed in the current research could be applied to any higher education institution for assessing its performance.

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Risk Management in Banks through Hedging

Bihari Suresh Chandra and Khanna Rishabh

Banking as a financial intermediary sector, faces numerous risks in the form of accounts converting to Non Performing Assets (NPAs) and also the risks which are uncontrollable like foreign exchange risk, interest rate risk etc. For this, the transit towards risk management practices in every sphere has become imperative in the present scenario. Indian Banks especially public sector banks have long used risk management activities such as duration and gap analysis where these banks manipulate their interest rates to manage their Asset-Liability mismatch. However, these activities are best suited for short term plans, for long term banks need to adopt another risk management activity where they can capitalize on more unexpected risk structures. Risk management through derivative securities has been another avenue for banks to refine risk management practices. Similar to other International markets, price and interest rate volatility in Indian financial markets is also high; hence the implications of not hedging the bank portfolio may prove to be disastrous. Derivatives give banks an opportunity to manage their risk exposure and to generate revenue. The research objectives framed to reiterate the importance of risk management practices through derivatives are to examine the derivative exposures in banks and to determine the influence of derivative exposure on bank’s intermediation role.

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Global Financial Meltdown and Indian Financial System: An Introspection

Bora Bedanta*, Bora Anindita and Jha Ajeya

In the age of globalization, no nation may remain isolated from the world economic volatility. The turmoil in international financial markets of few advanced economies that started around mid-2007 has exacerbated substantially, and led to the collapse of key financial institutions. Serious losses suffered by them have affected all most all countries of the world. India also not an exemption to it as those advanced economies has considerable investment interest in the country. Keeping aligned to this, the study under consideration makes an endeavor to examine the impact of global financial meltdown on Indian financial system. The methodology adopted here takes the project through retrospection of few empirical literatures and is based on secondary information, the sources of which follow government publications, periodicals, reports and related plan documents. Findings reveal that Foreign Institution Investors (FIIs) are moving back creating a huge gap in this regard. Further, the diverse constituents of Indian financial system namely, stock market, currency market, and mutual fund investment have by-and-large been hit by world financial contagion due to sub-prime crisis for a variety of reasons. As such, the policy formulators have to be vigilant in order to ensure a balanced state of affairs.

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‘Shaping Platform’ A Strategic Benchmark for Engineering Industries

Sathe Anita

The era of globalization is marked with features like technological and scientific developments, intense competition, consumer awareness, changing life cycle of a product, emergence of MNCs, cut throat compete-tion, increased stress levels, changing organization structures etc, making it difficult sustenance for the organizations. Organizations need to adopt competing technology for corporate effectiveness and success. This paper highlights on application of strategic benchmark of –‘shaping platform’ i.e. a set of clearly defined standards and practices which help to organize and support the activities of organization.

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Local Brand Vs Global Brand Syndrome – A Study with Reference to Indian Car Industry

Natarajan P. and Thiripurasundari U.

This study observes that consumer preference of global brands vs. local brands in the Indian car industry. Consumer brand perceptions have substantial implications in marketing. The customers’ preference towards local and global brands is studied by administering structured interview schedule with 150 customers in Puducherry city. The findings of the study advised that the consumers who possessed global car brands, preferred their car brands due to factors such as global presence, worldwide reputation and quality of being a foreign made. Consumers made favourable perceptions the country, wherein they tend to associate factors such as superior quality, technical advance-ments, modernization etc. to the country from which the brand had taken its origin. Consumers who owned a local brand evaluated the local brand in a favourable manner, wherein they tend to associate the brand to India’s strong automobile sector that makes quality and technically efficient cars.

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Efficacy of Knowledge Management Systems within Organizations of Udaipur Region

Mathur Meera and Gorach Rahila

The paper attempts to gauge the efficacy of Knowledge Management System (KMS) in the organizations situated in the geographical region of Udaipur. Efficacy, as defined for this study, is the perceived value of KMS as felt by the respondents in their day to day work. It is found that an overwhelming majority of organizations report their KMS imple-mentation to be highly useful and successful. The practical implementation of this study is to motivate other organizations that have not yet implemented a KMS to seriously consider making a switch.

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Determinants of Employee Engagement in a Private Sector Organization: An Exploratory Study

Sharma Baldev R. and Raina Anupama

Employee engagement has emerged as one of the most important topics in the sphere of human resource management. It stands for the extent to which the employees are committed to the vision, mission and goals of the organization and involved with the work they do. The study on which this paper is based seeks to ascertain the level of employee engagement and the determinants thereof among the sales executives of a private sector organization. Sample for the study consists of 51 sales executives of a manufacturing organization located in the National Capital Region. Data were collected with the help of an 80-item “structured” questionnaire and analysed using the SPSS package. The findings show an across- the-board low rating on all 14 parameters of the study. Multiple regression analysis revealed that four out of the 12 potential predictors, all of which belong to the situation within which the employees are working, are the critical determinants of employee engagement.

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Impact of Demographic Factors on Consumer Response to Sales Promotions: An Empirical Study

Patel Vipul

Sales promotion has grown enormously in recent years in India. Vast amount of money is being spent on sales promotion. It consists of a wide variety of short term tactical promotional tools aimed at generating a desired response from consumers. In this study, attempt is made to study the impact of demographic factors on consumer responses to sales promotions. Five demographic factors were considered to have impact on consumer responses to sales promotion. These demographic factors were gender, age, income, education and household size. 518 active mall shoppers are surveyed with the help of structured questionnaire in shopping malls located in the four cities of Gujarat. T-test and ANOVA were applied to test the null hypothesis. This study may provide refined insights in and understanding of the influence of sales promotions on consumer purchase behavior. The results of this study may help the marketing managers of retail stores to identify their target consumers and in turn, to develop appropriate sales promotional programs to persuade those consumers to purchase readymade garment.

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Leadership–Well Criticized than Well Understood

Badshah Shital

The success of any organization depends on its leadership. Although a good deal of research has been done on leadership, it is difficult to say what it is. While the term "leader" was noted as early as the 1300s and conceptualized even before biblical times, the term leadership has been in existence only since the late 1700s. Despite many thousands of theoretical and empirical studies, leadership remains a tantalizing enigma for thinkers and practitioners.

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