Moderating Role of Demographics on Attitude towards Organic Food Purchase Behavior

The purpose of the current research is to examine moderating role of demographics on attitude towards organic food purchase behavior. Environmental attitude components were classified as actual, verbal, and affect commitment. Data was collected through survey technique in six cities across India. The findings revealed that consumers' attitude towards organic food purchase was influenced by attitude components of Actual and Verbal commitment and moderated by demographic factors of income, gender and age. The findings can be of use to firms marketing organic food brands in India. Environmental attitude factors and demographic factors like income, age, and gender can be used for profiling consumers. With increased growth of organic food market in the country, green marketing and organic food products are upcoming research areas. There is limited research on Indian consumers' attitude towards organic food products. The findings can provide valuable insights to companies marketing these products in the country.

Role of Consumer Knowledge in Developing Purchase Intentions and Driving Services Efficiency across Marketing Channels in Mexico

This study is carried out in Mexico with an objective to analyse empirically the role of education in a transforming services marketing strategies of the firms. The study is carried on in Mexico through pragmatic investigation among the consumers subscribing to the communication and entertainment services. The analysis of primary data is developed around the theory of action that demonstrates the skills and confidence of individuals or groups towards making decision in acquiring or hiring services to improve their quality of life. The results of the study reveal that knowledge acquired on the services and value perceived by the consumers play key role in determining the intentions to purchases services. This study meticulously rows several arguments on how consumers with high level of education scrutinize the benefits offered by the firms marketing their communication and entertainment services, and build their value propositions on the services bought or contracted.

Training Effectiveness

HR practitioners time and again busy in finding the worth of their training programs. Outputs of training/Training Effectiveness/ROI of training programs are taking a huge attention of any HR department in any organization. Often attention was paid to the training program itself, the training environment, the trainer and the organizational climate and culture to apply the same into work. But many a times the very important part i.e. trainees were left aside. Present research is an attempt to address this gap. Trainees though found to be an important factor in success of any training program often this factor is limited to theoretical analysis. Rarely organizations and particularly the training department dare to ponder this. The type of trainee or in other way the characteristic of a trainee is found to be influential in many of the researches earlier. Here the attempt is to measure the link between the level of engagement and the perception of training effectiveness of the same trainees. This will help the training department to be more cautious while choosing their trainees to deliver an effective training program to fetch a dream achieved.

Assessing the Determinants of Adoption of M-Banking by Students

Technology is entwined in almost every part of one's lives. Today's students are using more technology than ever before. Information technology has revolutionized every industry and especially the banking industry. Tremendous improvements in technology have taken place in the Indian banking sector. Among all, Mobile Banking (m-banking) is the recent phenomenon that changed country's banking system. Students, being considered as most technically knowledgeable make most use of mobile banking services among all the banking customers. Therefore, the focus is particularly towards the young students engaging in m-banking services and to evaluate the factors that influence them to adopt m-banking. The study considers extended Technology Adoption Model (TAM) to measure the impact of the factors on adoption of m-banking. For the study, data was collected through questionnaire from 217 students of Western Rajasthan. The result of this research would provide valuable information to service providers in order to improve their m-banking services.

Consumer Impetuosity in M-Commerce

Existing research on impulsive buying focuses mainly on goods displayed in physical spaces and services delivered face to face. This paper aims to present a novel approach to analyze the impulsiveness on purchase through mobile devices by the development of a reliable and valid scale of impulsiveness in the context of mobile commerce, also known as m-commerce. To achieve the aforementioned research purpose, this paper views impulsiveness in m-commerce as a holistic process encompassing personal traits, stimulus level, and, product attributes to understand the motivational, emotional, and cognitive factors underlying the impulse buying journey and purchase decision on the basis of a scale to measure the construct. The paper concludes with a discussion on its conceptual and managerial contributions and interesting directions for future research.

Perception and Intention of Youth's Towards Online Shopping

This study aims to investigate youth consumer's perception and intention towards online shopping through integration of technological acceptance model (TAM). Data were collected from 263 young people residing in Bhubaneswar city of Odisha, a state in the eastern region of India through a structured questionnaire during May/June 2015. The structural Equation modeling was employed to analyze the data and validate the research model. The results of this study indicated that different perception variables have different relationships with behavioral intention of youths towards online shopping. The results from this study will be useful for e-commerce companies in formulating appropriate marketing strategies, as well as developing appropriate applications that will attract more consumers by increasing their benefit perception. This study is confined to the response of 263 young people residing in Bhubaneswar city of Odisha. In future of similar types of study may be conducted in either part of the state as well as country with a relatively larger sample size including customers from different age groups. Although past literatures have focused on technological aspects of online shopping, few studies have examined the perception and intention of youth towards online shopping. Furthermore, most studies on online shopping perception have focused on the relationships between technology adoption factors and perception of users. This study provides a basis for further refinement of TAM model to predict behavioral intentions of consumers towards online shopping.

Cyber Security and Business Growth

Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), particular the Internet, have been an increasingly important aspect of global social, political and economic life, and are the backbone of the global information society today. Their evolution and development has brought many benefits along with the threat of serious cyber-attacks that had been demonstrated over the past few years. Due to cybercrime business world drains huge money each year and incurs a large amount in resolving a single attack. It also damages organization's reputation and brand image, loss of intellectual property and sensitive data, loss of customer trust etc. Addressing major threats and challenges begins with setting up information security policy to ensure confidentiality, integrity and availability of company information and communication. Since telecom Sector is on its boom, a technological solution can solve the immediate challenges of identifying, investigating, and prosecuting computer- related crimes and changes required for long-term problem solving.

Competing on Performance on the Global Marketplace

Globalization has triggered many new ways for companies to improve their business performance and stay competitive in the marketplace. Initially most companies strengthen their capability and competence towards developing competitive differentiation through continuous innovation to stay competitive and build sustainable brand image for their products and services. Over the mid-twentieth century, the information technology has made manifold advance proving scope for the companies to access the market information, carry out data analytics to meet their corporate requirements, and to derive right business decision for developing right competitive strategies. Accordingly, the new approaches of decision support systems have emerged and companies are interestingly adapting to the new environment of information analysis. The Big Data, business analytics, and business intelligence approaches have enveloped the business-to-business and business-to-customer industries as a strong decision making tool of the twenty-first century. This chapter discusses the state-of-art approaches and their impact on market competitiveness of the companies.

Incidence of Green Accounting on Competitiveness

The traditional growth theories and neoclassical economic development models have dominated the economic policies in both developed and developing economies over last decades. As a result, the global output has increased manifold due to inherent cost competitiveness ingrained in neoclassical model that heavily relies on optimization of output and resources based on the marginality principle. However, income growth has resulted in environmental degradation and depletion of natural resources as the framework of SNA does not treat these resources as fixed capital and hence, the depreciation of such resources are not treated aptly in the framework of income accounting. The environmental degradation and the recent phenomenon in global warming and the debate of climate change have taken centre-stage in the political discourse. This prompts for an urgent need for an institutionalized market oriented framework to treat environmental costs and depletion of natural resources. This paper makes an attempt to provide a framework to estimate green income from Mining and Quarrying sector by incorporating depreciation factor and examines its implications for export competitiveness of the sectors which use the output of Mining sector as inputs.

Key Performance Indicators for the Organized Farm Products Retailing in India

The Non-livestock products include Horticulture products (flowers, fruits, nuts, vegetables and medicinal plants) and Agriculture products (Crops like; rice, cotton, wheat). These items share the maximum sale of the farm products. Unfortunately, the farm production in India has witnessed a huge wastage. It has attracted the attention of many practitioners and policy makers. Witnessing the opportunity many organized retail players have entered the arena to sell farm products. However, the supply chain (SC) performance measurement has remained the major challenge as “No measurement no improvement”. Many organizations are searching for an efficient SC performance measurement system. Our study recommends that the SC performance shall be improved by developing a SC strategy based on a limited set of key performance indicators (KPI). Otherwise, managers shall waste time and resources on the undesirable performance indicators. We have identified and classified the KPI for non-livestock retailing SC management into five groups. These are 1) Customer Attraction Metrics (product quality, product personality, process quality); 2) Inventory Metrics (fill rate, customer response time, return adjustment, spoilage adjustment, and Vendor managed inventory); 3) Attractiveness Metrics (inventory cost, distribution cost, Return on investment, stakeholder value, sales profit and channel flexibility); 4) Transportation Metrics (shipping errors, and volume flexibility); and 5) Customer Metrics (lead time, delivery flexibility, and backorder flexibility). This grouping shall help the practitioners to focus on a limited set of KPI for better management of supply chains.