Search results

Google commands approximately 70 per cent of search market share worldwide, resulting in businesses investing heavily in search engine advertising on Google to target potential customers. Recently, Google changed the way in which content and ads were displayed on the search engine results page. This reshuffling of content and ads is expected to affect the advertisers who advertise on Google and/or use it to drive traffic to their websites. The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of these changes on various stakeholders.

Data have been collected from various sources on the internet including blogs and discussion forums. Netnography has been used as it allows a detailed evaluation of the consumers’ needs, wants and choices in a virtual space.

The average cost-per-click for ads on the top positions is expected to increase. Advertisers whose ads usually occupy the lower positions would be adversely affected. To counter this, more emphasis should be placed on ad extensions and on product listing ads. In addition, organizations would benefit from increased efforts on search engine optimization.

A variety of coping strategies have been developed that can help marketers to successfully navigate through the change, including the use of ad extensions and the use of product listing ads.

This practice-focused paper offers guidelines for digital marketers to use sponsored search more effectively as part of their arsenal in light of some important changes recently made by Google. The potential of netnography as a research methodology has also been expanded by using it in a novel setting and in drawing up actionable insights.

Consumers are increasingly choosing social media over other channels and mechanisms for grievance redressal. However, not all social media grievances elicit a response from businesses. Hence, in this research the authors aim to explore the effect of the complainant's social characteristics and the complaint's social and content characteristics on the likelihood of receiving a response to a grievance from the business on social media.

The authors build a conceptual model and then empirically test it to explore the effect of the complainant's characteristics and the complaint's characteristics on the likelihood of response from a business on social media. The authors use data of consumer grievances received by an Indian airline operator on Twitter during two time periods – the first corresponding to lockdown during Covid-19 pandemic, and the second corresponding to the resumption of business as usual following these lockdowns. The authors use logistic regression and the hazard rate model to model the likelihood of response and the response delay, respectively, for social media customer grievances.

Complainants with high social influence are not more likely to get a response for their grievances on social media. While tagging other individuals and business accounts in a social media complaint has negative effect on the likelihood of business response in both the time periods, the effect of tagging regulatory bodies on the likelihood of response was negative only in the Covid-19 lockdown period. The readability and valence of a complaint were found to positively affect the likelihood of response to a social media grievance. However, the effect of valence was significant only in lockdown period.

This research offers insights on what elicits responses from a service provider to consumers' grievances on social media platforms. The extant literature is a plenty on how firms should be engaging consumers on online media and how online communities should be built, but scanty on grievance redressal on social media. This research is, therefore, likely to be useful to service providers who are inclined to improve their grievance handling mechanisms, as well as, to regulatory authorities and ombudsmen.

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize a model for sponsored search advertising by incorporating a number of factors which affect the performance of these ads.

The authors draw upon the professional experience and practitioner as well as academic literature to build and analyze the model. Propositions have been forwarded to delineate the various relationships at work in a sponsored search process.

The extant literature on this topic has so far been unable to provide a holistic overview. The paper offers propositions for explaining the role of various factors like the ad rank, branding, role of ad extensions and how impact of these factors may be sensitive to the device used for search.

This work is derived primarily from practice. It is hope that after due empirical validation, advertisers, users as well as search engines will benefit from this stream of research.

This is one of the first works to analyze a sponsored search ad at a micro level. It brings into focus one of the largely unexplored facets of sponsored search advertising.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the understanding the role of consumer experiences, instantiated through gift giving and game play, in communication of brand values.

The paper is based on in-depth phenomenological interviews of marketing managers and various channel intermediaries involved in the execution of a mass brand promotion program in rural India.

The study reveals the employment of innovative game designs and gift choices, their design rooted deep in the village populace’s context and life experiences. It shows how the consumer’s experience created through games and gifts shapes their perceptions about the brand leading to favorable consideration and purchase outcomes for it.

This work is derived primarily from practice. It is hoped that industry practitioners will benefit from this stream of research and will use games and gifts in innovative ways to engage customers and create brand experiences.

This is one of the first works to highlight the importance of games and gifts in experiential marketing literature. It brings into focus one of the largely unexplored facets of customer engagement in rural India.

Strategic Management.

The case is designed for a) MBA students b) Short-duration executive MBA courses.

The case refers to India’s leading steel company Tata Steel. Tata Tiscon, the steel rebar brand, is the organization’s leading retail brand. The case chronicles the period between the birth of the retail brand in the year 2000, its dramatic rise and dominance, to the end of 2013 when some of its initiatives had failed. Tata Tiscon was established as a pan Indian brand on the dint of a distribution network comprising 33 distributors and over 2000 retailers, many of them exclusive to the brand. The brand spawned a series of innovation in the category like “selling by piece”, fixed price concept and “free” home delivery. Together with its channel partners, the company achieved dramatic success which was reflected in its leading market share coupled with significant price premium in a category where price had traditionally being the only selling pitch. After 2010, the company saw an emerging challenge in the form of a new business model, where some companies were gearing to provide the complete portfolio of construction material including cement, steel, etc., and a turnkey construction solution for house builders. Tata Tiscon responded by attempting to enter the service space by launching a building design solution and later a construction supervision solution. Both of these initiatives failed. The protagonist of the case is Mr Keshav Viswanath (Chief of Marketing for retail business at Tata Steel), who is concerned with the failures of these key initiatives and is wondering how to ensure the “leader” status of Tata Tiscon in coming years.

The students are expected to understand how a core strategy like differentiation is implemented successfully in “practice”; understand the exploitation–exploration dichotomy in an organization; appreciate difference between radical innovation (based on new organizational routines, new business partners and new relationships) and incremental innovation based on fine tuning of existing organizational routines and relationships.

Rebar production: www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6n9sci8j-8; Tata TISCON AV: www.youtube.com/watch?v=89kOUsbnaYQ; TQM – The Toyota Way: www.youstube.com/watch?v=qf3gdrIMxRw; Disruptive vs. Incremental Innovation: www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOOL_GiaLTo; Approach to innovation is dead wrong: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pii8tTx1UYM

CSS 11: Strategy.

When induction motors are considered, there is no specific cost model for net savings per year due to condition-based maintenance (CBM) covering various parameters such as downtime, energy, quality, etc. The purpose of this paper is to develop a cost model for the financial viability of the implementation of CBM for induction motors.

A literature review has been carried out to identify the existing failure modes of motor, available condition monitoring techniques, the usefulness of CBM and different maintenance models available. Then, a cost model considering all parameters has been proposed.

A cost model has been proposed for the maintenance of induction motors. Method for the economic evaluation of the model has also been suggested in the paper. The application of the model has been illustrated through a case study of a steel plant, which suggests that investment in the condition monitoring of induction motors increases the net profit of the organization.

The proposed model is specifically designed for induction motors. All the motors under consideration are assumed to be of the same specifications, and fault in any motor is supposed to have the same effect on quality, cost, criticality, etc., of the operation and end product.

This paper will help the maintenance manager in decision making when maintenance action has to be carried out for a given motor under CBM for the better utilization of the equipment and resources. This paper also shows how to compute ROI on CBM investment.

The paper provides a cost model for the economic evaluation of implementing CBM for induction motors which will be useful to researchers and maintenance managers in effective decision making and maintenance planning. The methodology and the cost models are the original contribution of the authors.

This study aims to develop customer trust through information quality, customer awareness, and perceived value. This study is motivated by the hustle and bustle occurred as the result of the socialization of MyPertamina, a digital payment service for subsidized fuel customers in 11 areas of 4 provinces in Indonesia. The hustle and bustle can be viewed as customer distrust of MyPertamina. However, customer trust is a business success key. Is MyPertamina a solution or problem maker for customers to buy subsidized fuel?

The design of this study is survey. Primary data are collected through questionnaires sent to subsidized fuel customers in the socialization areas of MyPertamina. The data are processed using SPSS and Amos programs.

PV, IQ and CA, respectively, can develop CT on MyPertamina. Although the PV cannot strengthen the effect of CA on CT, the construct can strengthen the effect of IQ on CT.

Indonesian Government via Pertamina, a state-owned enterprise, must develop CT through IQ, CA and PV to succeed the application of MyPertamina.

This study develops IQ, CA and PV based on technology acceptance model and theory of reasoned action to develop CT on MyPertamina.

According to the 70th round of the National Sample Survey published by the Government of India in 2014, the incidence of indebtedness among households in the rural areas of Telangana state, India, is twice that of rural all-India. Around 59 per cent of rural households are indebted in Telangana as against 31 per cent all-India. The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent and magnitude of indebtedness among rural households in the Medak district of Telangana state. Further, the authors wanted to identify the sources of credit to these households and for what purpose the loans were utilised.

To achieve the objective, the authors conducted a primary-level household survey in one of the distressed districts in newly formed state. The authors applied the Bayesian and the Lasso regression methods to identify the factors that impact indebtedness of a household.

The OLS results based on the Lasso regression results show that among all the explanatory variables, principal occupation, use of modern technology, the rate of interest, household medical expenditure and source of loan are significant, indicating that these variables significantly affect the loan taken by the farmers in the study area. The study shows that alternative sources of non-farm income and promotion of modern technology in agriculture can reduce the incidence of farmers’ indebtedness in India.

The paper contains significant information with regard to indebtedness. It focusses on the issue troubling the authorities the most. It provides the ground realities of the incidence of indebtedness in Medak, one of the most distressed districts of Telangana, a Southern Indian state. There have been very few similar studies done in the newly formed state. The paper has employed an advanced statistical technique, i.e. Heckman’s selection regression technique, to study farmers’ indebtedness in India. It provides a means of correcting for non-randomly selected samples, which otherwise can lead to erroneous conclusions and poor policy.