KIT: Hotels in India - The demand and supply

Strategic tools for the practising manager

Currently, India has about 1.14 lakh hotel rooms.

The total shortfall is estimated at around 1.55 lakh rooms across the country.

The country has 95 four-star hotels catering to 8,000 people (rooms).

There are 204 five-star hotels catering to 30,200 people (rooms).

The one- and two-star categories have the highest number of hotels — 1,400, catering to 58,400 people (rooms).

NUGGETS
Selections from management journals

With mass layoffs in 2008 and 2009 an all too common occurrence, employees are more than a bit shell-shocked at work. How can managers continue to motivate their staff during these difficult times? Despite the negative news, professors at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School note that building and keeping trust in an organisation remains essential to motivating employees when a company is in the midst of economic tumult.

Using the power of trust to motivate in difficult times
Knowledge@Emory
February 11 - March 10
Read this article at http://knowledge.emory.edu/

Getting customers to spread the word about a new product through their social or professional networks is a hot strategy in the marketing world. But how do companies find the right individuals to deliver the message? New research by Wharton marketing professors Raghuram Iyengar and Christophe Van den Bulte finds that traditional targets may not be so influential.

The buzz starts here: Finding the first mouth for word-of-mouth marketing
Knowledge@Wharton
March 4-17
Read this article at http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/

When most organisations are under spending pressure or have to cut costs, marketing efforts are one of the first things to go. This fact has spawned a growing area of research into marketing’s impact on the financial performance of a firm. In their new paper “Customer Satisfaction and Stock Returns Risk,” Sundar Bharadwaj, associate professor of marketing at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, and Goizueta doctoral graduate Kapil R Tuli examine the impact of customer satisfaction on stock returns risk.

Beyond showing that investments in customer satisfaction insulate a firm’s stock returns from market movements and lower the volatility of its stock returns, the study also proves that customer satisfaction is a metric that offers valuable information to financial markets.

Positive feedback: Why customer satisfaction means more than just happy customers
Knowledge@Emory
February 11 - March 10
Read this article at http://knowledge.emory.edu/

At the turn of the millennium, the locus of global economic growth has increasingly shifted toward developing economies in Asia, Africa and South America. However, even as companies venture into these areas, their managers have encountered an unfamiliar retail format: tens of thousands of scattered, unsophisticated, small retail outlets. Retailing concepts developed in the context of developed economies are often not applicable in the small retailer context.

Lenartowicz and Balasubramanian’s findings yield several managerial insights. First, with the revealed knowledge about how small retailers make ordering decisions, managers can influence these decisions more effectively to enhance the overall efficiency of the supply chain. Second, managers can optimally design supply-side policies to have the desired impact on retail and channel performance.

Accordingly, managers can redesign credit policies to reinvigorate their role as a driver of retail performance. Likewise, in line with the study’s findings, managers can fine-tune training and policies related to the sales force to enhance its effect on retail performance. Overall, the findings yield insights into how small retailers in developing economies function and how they can be better managed.

Practices and performance of small retail stores in developing economies
By Tomasz Lenartowicz and Sridhar Balasubramanian
Journal of International Marketing,
Volume 17, Number 1, March 2009
Subscribe to this article at www.marketingpower.com