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In a story called “The Birthmark,” Nathaniel Hawthorne tells about an extraordinarily lovely woman whose beauty was perfect except for a small birthmark on her cheek. This flaw would not have mattered if found on the face of an ordinary woman, but because of this woman's near perfection, the birthmark could never be ignored. Her husband, a brilliant natural scientist, grieved over the one imperfection and took up research to discover a cure. He finally developed a potion and the birthmark began to disappear. At the moment when the birthmark completely vanished from her skin and she was perfect, she died.

The purpose of this paper is to assess Indian consumers' brand consciousness by examining their brand knowledge, purchase behaviour and perceptions of foreign brands. It provides key inputs for global retailers to harness the potential in growing consumerism in India.

A survey of 300 Indian consumers was conducted and the data were analysed using descriptive and simple regression techniques.

The study found that brand purchase in India varies across product categories. At present, consumer knowledge and use of foreign brands is low, and Indian consumers are price‐sensitive. Indian consumers are experimenting with brands and would like more foreign brands to enter the Indian market.

Due to the small sample size, advanced econometrics techniques could not be used to analyse the dataset.

The paper is the first to assess the impact of retail liberalisation on Indian consumers' shopping behaviour, particularly their brand consciousness.

This paper aims to systematically investigate the direct and indirect effects of four types of support – peer instrumental support, peer emotional support, platform business support and platform communication support – on seller trade volume in social commerce. It also aims to uncover the path of support-to-sales of the seller from a platform perspective and provides a more complete picture of the social commerce phenomenon.

This paper uses multi-source data including primary survey data and secondary data on trade volume to test the hypotheses. PROCESS mediation model is used to analyze the multi-source data set.

This study finds that the positive effects of peer instrumental support, platform business support and platform communication support on seller trade volume are fully mediated by seller collaborative information exchange. Also, peer emotional support has a significant negative effect on seller trade volume and collaborative information exchange can serve as a buffer to mitigate the negative effect.

The authors provide new insights into what types of support are or are not conducive to improving transaction volume of individual sellers and highlight the mediating role of seller information exchange in this value generation process in social commerce. These findings advance current knowledge of how seller interactions increase value in social commerce. The chosen research setting may limit the generalizability of the findings of this study.

This paper offers valuable implications for social commerce platforms on how to better serve their sellers to achieve high growth. Specifically, the findings suggest that platforms should encourage instrumental support and information exchange among peer sellers. In addition, platforms should expand seller support from a single-focus on sellers’ business to a dual-focus on both sellers’ business and socialization in social commerce.

This paper fulfills an identified need to study how sellers can better derive value from the social interactions and how social commerce platforms can effectively influence transactions, support sales and serve as a selling platform.

Given India's rapid industrial growth and burgeoning numbers of sales and marketing employees, there is an urgent need to develop India‐centric B2B sales management knowledge. However, there is little hard information about similarities or differences between sales management strategies in India and the developed economies. To shed more light on this issue, in this commentary the aim is to report the results of a novel exploratory study of recent India B2B sales job ads motivated by the idea that sales recruiting is a critical sales management function that provides insights into hiring organizations' overall business strategy.

The authors content analyze a sample of India sales job ad postings to identify the job goals, skills and additional roles sought by Indian B2B sales recruiters. Subsequently, they use latent class clustering to segment companies along these requirements.

It is found that B2B sales organizations in India appear to be recruiting according to the same core strategies, principles and criteria as those in the developed world, especially with regard to customer management.

This research develops confidence that some extant B2B sales management theories, models, and knowledge accumulated in developed markets are applicable to the Indian context, with suitable modifications to accommodate idiosyncratic cultural and economic differences.

This is the first, albeit exploratory, effort to utilize the content of India‐specific B2B sales job advertisements as a source of data and insights into sales management strategies in India.

The author describes how he entered the marketing field and describes his contributions in four sections: articles written, books published, students nurtured, and executives consulted and trained. He describes his contributions to the marketing field in nine areas: marketing theory and orientations, improving the role and practice of marketing, analytical marketing, the social and ethical side of marketing, globalization and international marketing competition, marketing in the new economy, creating and managing the product mix, strategic marketing, and broadening the concept and application of marketing.

Marketing, retail.

The case study is specific to the marketing demographics of Indian shoppers with respect to organized retail stores, and therefore, the inter-relationships between various design elements and the relative importance of certain parameters discussed in the text may not follow the same pattern elsewhere in the world.

The case emulates the real-life situation of an organized retail store, Super Mart, to understand the inculcation of voice of the customer in the design of organized retail stores in India. It gives insights about factors which influence the shopping intent of customers while giving information about the inter-relationships among various design characteristics. It also gives an idea about inter-dependence between design characteristics and customer requirements. This is followed by certain questions, the responses to which can be interpreted from the text and the data provided therein.

The case aims to educate its audience about the following aspects of organized retail business: factors influencing offline shopping intent of customers; relative order of importance of customer requirements with respect to organized retail stores; inter-relationships between various design elements; and future trends in the organized retail space. Such a knowledge would help hone the skills of the next generation of business leaders in the retail space.

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The purpose of this study is to investigate the influential factors of customer loyalty to Islamic banks, namely, service quality, customer satisfaction, customer engagement and religiosity.

This study is a survey of 335 Islamic bank customers in West Sumatra, Indonesia. This research deployed purposive sampling and analyzed the data by using covariance-based structural equation modeling.

Service quality has a positive and significant impact on customer satisfaction. Religiosity has a significant and negative moderating impact on the service quality–customer satisfaction relationship. Service quality has no significant influence on customer loyalty. Customer satisfaction is a significant antecedent of customer engagement and loyalty. Finally, customer engagement has a significant and positive effect on customer loyalty.

This study is a combination of cross-sectional and a single-country case. Accordingly, the results may not be representative of other countries. Similar studies in longitudinal data collection are conducted in other countries (e.g. ASEAN countries), which would therefore be worthwhile. Some antecedents of customer loyalty have been neglected in this study (e.g. customer value co-creation and customer commitment); hence, the future study may investigate those factors.

By considering these Islamic banks’ antecedents, the Islamic banks might enhance their customer loyalty. Also, this study has revealed the moderating role of religiosity in a loyalty relationship. Therefore, it will give insights for the Islamic bank managers in decision-making.

This study has revealed the moderating role of religiosity on the link between service quality and customer satisfaction in Islamic banks, which is, to the authors’ knowledge, neglected in the previous studies. The customers with high religiosity will have a higher standard of satisfaction and demand a better service quality than the customers with low religiosity. This study has also examined the relationships between service quality, religiosity, customer satisfaction, customer engagement and loyalty as a whole, which have been limited previously.