Marketing

The study is on the determinants of factors affecting net return of tomato in Owerri metropolis of Imo State, Nigeria, A sample size of 60 tomato traders of 30 wholesalers and 30 Retailers were randomly selected .Simple descriptive statistics, marketing margin tool and net return model were used to analyze the data. The study showed that traders were faced with several constraints and the major one in the study area was hourly fluctuation in market prices, Based on the findings, marketers were advised to belong to cooperative were they can together build adequate storage facility for their produce.

Environmental considerations such as the energy, resources or chemical used during manufacturing or environmental implications during its use or disposal stage has a vital role to play in the purchase decision making of consumers’ specially in the developed economies. Consumers’ perceptions towards eco-labels, their environmental concern and choice behavior for purchase of products across the two different categories were analyzed using a validated likert scale. A structural equation modeling methodology and analysis of variance was applied to test a casual model regarding environmental concern, eco-label awareness and consumers’ evaluation across two product categories. The results suggest the whacking role of eco-labels on products when associated with financial savings in market share augmentation for environmentally preferable alternatives subjected to consumers’ environmental approach in an emerging market.

Vital role of exporting to the world and countless benefits of export for firms and countries cause the increasing attention to the determinants of firm export performance. However, despite numerous published works on determinants of firm export performance, the literatures are characterized by the inaccuracy in measurement of export performance determinants that led to inconsistent and opposing findings. The future research should attention the previous problems in evaluating determinants of firm export performance to facilitate theory development. This paper evaluates many studies concerning measurement of export performance determinants. This study organized into two sections: first, recognition the determinants of export performance that led to confuse and conflicting findings. Second, methods to evaluate export performance determinants are analyzed. In the end, the finding is discussed and direction for future research is mentioned.

India is acknowledged as the biggest retail market in the world next to China. The sector is the largest source of employment after agriculture. Nearly 40 million people employed in retail sector which accounts for 8% of the total employment and 4% of the entire population. According to the A.T. Kearney Global Retail Development Index (2011), Indian retail sector accounts for 22 percent of the country’s GDP. Total retail market in India which stood at Rs. 20,00,000 Crores in 2009-10 which increased to Rs.23,50,000 crores in 2010-11 which is estimated to attain Rs.28,65,000 Crores by 2012-13. An ASSOCHAM report states that India's overall retail sector is expected to rise to Rs.41,65,000 by 2013 and to Rs.USD 1.3 trillion by 2018, at a compounded annual growth rate of 10% driven by the emergence of shopping centers and malls. India’s organized retail market was estimated to be Rs.96500 Crores in 2008 accounts for around 5 percent of the total retail market, which increased to Rs.1,50,000 crores in 2011 accounting for 6-7 per cent of total retail. Organized Retail has been growing at an impressive rate of 35 to 40 percent per year compared to 9 to10 percent growth in the overall retail industry. The business in the organized retail sector of India is expected to reach the level of $100 billion by the year 2015. In India 98 percent of business is being run by the unorganized retailers. Recently, the government of India has permitted a FDI in multi-brand retailing which has triggered a debate on whether India should allow entry of foreign retailers or not. In the light of this development, a study has been conducted to find out the challenges and opportunities of allowing FDI in multi-brand retailing. It is observed that multi-brand retailing will have positive as well negative impact on Indian economy, Indian retail sector, customers, farmers and society. It is also found that there are several challenges before foreign players which are needed to be addressed by them before entering into India.

The aim of this study is to identify factors that leads to the importance of priority banking services in Indonesia through available secondary data found in the literature. The factors include bank customer’s characteristics, the amount of bank deposits and investments made in retail banks, and the range of products/services offers by different banks. The study also describes the definitions and characteristics of priority banking services. Using categorization of customer’s segments, the authors explain why this service and customers are both important to the Indonesian banking industry in particular retail banks to date and in future.

The main objective of this study is to find out if there is any relationship between Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and organizational performance in Nigerian banks. Relevant literature was reviewed and a model consisting of twenty six variables was conceptualized and tested by means of empirical data collected through a questionnaire survey. A total of two hundred and twenty four (224) copies of a questionnaire were administered, two hundred and eleven (211) copies were duly completed and returned. The result of the descriptive statistics shows that Customer Focused Services, Information and Communication Technology, Complaints Management, High Quality Service, Timeliness in Service Delivery, Security of Money, Friendliness of Employees, Ease of Opening Account, Competitive Charges on Services, Availability of Credit are CRM strategies used in Nigerian banks. It also reveals a difference in the perception of staff and customers. The result of the spearman rank correlation, Mann- Whitney U test and partial correlations provided support for these findings and confirm that there is a positive relationship between customer relationship management and organizational performance (as conceptualized by customer satisfaction, customer retention, increase in number of customers and increased net profit. It was also found that companies image and branch network intervene in the relationship between CRM and organizational performance.

Greening of industry relates to the greening of the process of producing and the product as most pollution occurs due to process of raw materials. In this article, we propose that green product innovation, green process innovation and combined green innovation will be positively influencing manufacturing firms to achieve corporate competitive advantages in the marketplace. This is in line with a suggestion in the literature whereby firms that implement green technology and show high environmental performance to be prone towards being profitable compared to those that are not. If this is true, then the proposed model is expected to show positive results, indicating that green innovation investment is indeed beneficial to manufacturing firms to as a business strategic tool to compete in the marketplace. Thus, the importance of green innovation practices in corporation should be implemented by firms.

The competitive, complex and dynamic environment of the banking industry nowadays can lead to a great transformation in making the business due to an increasingly demanding customer. The traditional product-oriented bank is moving toward customer-oriented which focuses on customer loyalty as its main goal because of stiff competition. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the extent to which demographics correlated with service loyalty focusing on credit card service. A sample of 200 respondents was randomly chosen in this survey which 150 respondents gave the feedback. Correlation Pearson test being used to determine the relationship between demographic factors (age, gender, income level, occupation and lifestyle) and customer loyalty. The result from hypotheses testing has shown that only income level has positive relationship with customer loyalty as compared to other four demographic factors. This finding is also in line with what has been found by East (1995) indicated that shoppers who are more concerned about prices are less loyal, with high income groups being more loyal than low income groups.

Excellent companies have clear missions and strategic intent; they have core competencies and the intense dedication of their staff enable them to match these against customer needs. Through mergers and acquisitions a firm stands a chance to build on its achievement and surpass their competitors. The primary sources of long term profitability are talents or resources that competitors cannot imitate. Abilities or resources that are easily copied soon lose their value. But the core competencies, competitive advantages and synergies (mergers) that inhere in a tight configuration and very hard to imitate. Mergers creatively combine many elements that mutually reinforce one another. This makes merging difficult to duplicate/copy. From the research conducted, it was concluded that highly merged organisations possess a clear sense of direction. Their goals inspire, their strategies are clear, and their efforts are well targeted. So employees are committed and co-ordination is graceful. Merging present advantages and get firms with distinctive competencies and product/service that key competitors cannot imitate. Mergers can be as great competitive advantage as any other aspect of strategy.

Intensity of competition necessitates many industries, especially the petrochemical industry, to adopt new marketing paradigm named as successful marketing. In this turbulent environment, petrochemical industries have to change their way of response to market; therefore, it is not unexpected that the implementation of successful marketing programs face with various factors. Thus, this study investigates and identifies successful marketing factors in Laleh petrochemical Company and specifies their importance. This study is an applied research in terms of objective which has gathered information from both interviewing with experts and distributing the questionnaires. The results of theoretical investigation was reached to six individual, organizational, product, price, promotion and distribution elements as key factors of successful marketing. After identifying, these factors were prioritized using Fuzzy TOPSIS technique and based on the comments received from the experts of petrochemical industry. The results showed that the product-related factors have the most importance, and organizational, personal, promotion, price, and distribution factors have the next ranks respectively. Finally, the components of each of these factors were also prioritized.