Strategic tools for the practising manager.
The hospitality sector contributes 5.8 per cent to India’s GDP ($1.17 trillion in 2007).
The sector is set to touch $250 billion over the next 10 years.
Star-rated hotels constitute about 30 per cent of the hospitality industry.
In 2007, we had about 204 five-star hotels in the country.
India needs 150,000 additional rooms at present to meet the demand.
Only about 53,000 new rooms are expected to be added by 2011, leaving a big gap in supply and demand.
NUGGETS
Selections from management journals
Consumers often seek reasons to justify their decisions or choices, in particular when committing to indulgence decisions. Consumers are more likely to indulge when they perceive a good justification for doing so and expect to feel better when they indulge with a good reason than when they indulge without a good reason. However, there is no direct evidence that consumers’ expectations are correct. Extant literature has focused either on consumers’ predictions or reported preferences or on their purchase behaviour. What is missing are assessments of consumers’ actual affective experiences during indulgences for which they perceive or do not perceive a legitimate reason.
The authors hypothesise that consumers enjoy their indulgences as much when they have a legitimate reason as when they do not, in contrast to what their own naive theories would predict. As the conceptual model specifies, when consuming hedonic goods or services, people are drawn toward aspects of the consumption, such as features of the goods, services, or consumption environment. In contrast, when making a decision or when evaluating decisions after they have been made, people base their judgments on accessible general knowledge and beliefs because they have no direct access to details of the hedonic experience of past or future consumption episodes.
Do we really need a reason to indulge?
By Jing Xu and Norbert Schwarz
Journal of Marketing Research,
Volume 46, Number 1, February 2009
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For any shopper who noticed how the price of hamburger and lettuce jumped after gas prices soared last year, this should come as no surprise: Buyers eventually feel the pinch when their suppliers’ expenses surge. The reason? Buyers and sellers operate within networks that exceed the one-on-one, buyer-seller bond. That’s why Thomas Choi, a professor of supply chain management at the W P Carey School of Business, thinks supply chain professionals would be wise to look beyond the supplier to its supply network. Without it buyers are not examining all the factors affecting the strength and reliability of the suppliers they choose. Such shortsightedness leaves buyers vulnerable to supply troubles and missed opportunities.
No firm is an island: Why buyers should probe a supplier’s network
Knowledge@W P Carey
January 14, 2009
Read this article at http://knowledge.wpcarey.asu.edu/
Positioning strategies frequently aim to associate brands with masculine or feminine personality traits. Consumers draw on these gender dimensions of brand personality to enhance their own degree of masculinity or femininity when they use brands for self-expressive purposes. So far, marketers have had to use personality scales developed for the assessment of human personality traits to measure gender dimensions of brand personality in the evaluation of positioning or repositioning strategies. This article describes eight studies conducted to develop and validate a two-dimensional scale measuring masculine and feminine brand personality.
Gender dimensions of brand personality
By Bianca Grohmann
Journal of Marketing Research,
Volume 46, Number 1, February 2009
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The paper finds that in more and more industrial sectors, companies view strong brand management as a powerful mechanism for expanding into adjacent markets, acquiring and retaining scarce talent and counterbalancing the strength of downstream customers. It draws on Lippincott research showing the percentages of Fortune 500 companies engaged in rebranding campaigns, and brings in examples to show that companies are reassessing brand value with business objectives in mind. It lays out the myths that stymie action and describes practices that underpin B2B branding success.
The rise and rise of the B2B brand
By Rick Wise and Jana Zednickova
Journal of Business Strategy 2009, Volume 30, Issue 1
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