No abstract

Creating and maintaining strong brand and a band wagon of loyal customers have become increasingly difficult in today's competitive environment due to proliferation of numerous brands in a generic product category. Brand loyalty has been shown to be associated with higher rates of return on investment due to increase in the market share. Children's influence on family purchase decision depends on a number of parameters and situations. Children exercise various methods to influence their parents' decision. Their influence varies from products to products. It depends on parents' education, profession, income, single parent working or both parents working, and type of family. Astonishingly, very few studies have been undertaken to relate the brand loyalty and product involvement behavior of teenagers. The data for this study are gathered from a cross section of teenagers of different socioeconomic backgrounds, from the major metros of Indi during the third quarter of 2014. In this paper aside including only involvement of product brand influence scores, brand trust and the size of the consideration set have been incorporated to predict brand loyalty of teens. The findings of the study reveal that multi-dimensional measure is a better predictor of loyalty behavior. Research findings also reveal that different explanatory variables have diverse influence on the brand loyalty behavior of teens.

There are numerous papers dwelling on the effects of locus of control on job performance but the process that explains the behaviour of sales personnel in the services sector has not received considerable attention from the HRM practitioners as well as researchers. The present study is conducted with the premise that customer orientation plays an important role which is influenced by the locus of control of sales personnel from the services sector. The data for the study were collected from a cross-section of respondents employed in the services sector in various towns of North Bengal. A structured questionnaire was administered on 200 respondents out of which 19 were unacceptable since they have not been answered properly. Apart from various descriptive measures, factor analysis and multiple regression techniques were employed to analyse the data. Findings of the study reveal that sales personnel having high internal locus of control exhibit higher customer orientation. The findings also reveal that sales personnel working under job-induced stress are likely to practise sales orientation. The outcome of the study amply demonstrates that the HR managers should influence the salespeople to follow customer orientation and help reduce their stress level by adopting appropriate HR policies to induce a vibrant CRM system in the organisation. Practical implications and suggestions for future research are also discussed.

A radical shift has been witnessed in consumer buying behavior worldwide due to the outbreak of COVID-19. With the increasing demand for smartphones across the globe, there is a need for marketers to identify the taste and preferences of the prospects. In this study, we have made an effort to understand prospects’ views on the attributes of smartphones. An attempt has been made to understand the desirable combinations in the light of reputed brands the prospects are seeking before making a commitment. We even tried to rank different brands using the Multi-Attribute Decision Making (MADM) technique to help the marketers for framing marketing strategies to compete in this volatile market.