What are the factors that could help increase car sales for leading vehicle manufacturers (VMs) in India? What makes customers buy a particular brand or be loyal to the same brand time and again? Some reasons include cost of the car, brand image, fuel efficiency, car makers&rsquo; reputation, car design etc. Can the after-sales service experience help sell more cars or make owners stay loyal to a brand for long? The answer seems to be &lsquo;yes&rsquo; according to Indian customers.

Vehicle servicing: the consumer is king

Business Standard

The US-based global management consulting firm, A T Kearney, in its Global Retail Development Index 2011, has ranked India as the fourth most attractive nation for retail investment, among 30 emerging markets. The rapid expansion of India&rsquo;s retail industry also means there is great demand for real estate. Analysts say international hypermarket chains like Walmart, Tesco and Carrefour &mdash; apart from national chains such as Big Bazaar and More &mdash; will absorb a large chunk of retail real estate in tier II and tier III cities. In this interview to Saumya Prakash, John Strachan, partner &amp; global head of retail, Cushman &amp; Wakefield, address some of the industry&rsquo;s most pressing issues.

India needs to develop and offer more quality retail spaces at commercially viable costs: John Strachan

Audio technology company Dolby Laboratories has always set the benchmark as far as cinema sound is concerned. Now it wants to kick off a similar experience across television, tablets and mobile phones. Ramzi Haidamus, Global Head, Dolby Laboratories, spoke to Varada Bhat on the company&rsquo;s delivery strategy and growth in the Indian market.

India has been a part of the Dolby fabric: Ramzi Haidamus

Established in 1995, eBay was one of the original Silicon Valley wonders, and among the few survivors of the dotcom bubble. While globally the company, with annual revenues of $11.65 billion in 2011, is an undisputed success story, in India eBay is still not among the frontrunners in the e-retailing space.

Beating the early mover disadvantage

Video-sharing website YouTube will now offer original content creators a chance to monetise their work uploaded on the website without any prerequisites. The programme is being rolled out in select countries like Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States at the moment. It will be expanded to countries like India over the next couple of months.

YouTube: The new mantra: create, share, earn

Woodland, the footwear and apparel brand known for its rugged, close-to-nature image, is trying to come close to its customers with its online store woodlandworldwide.com. Launched in March 2012, the site currently features only the &ldquo;hottest selling items from the brand&rsquo;s Spring Summer 2012 collection,&rdquo; says Harkirat Singh, managing director, Woodland. &ldquo;Eventually, the website will have the entire range. We are building the catalogue,&rdquo; he adds.

Woodland: Reaching out, the eco-friendly way

The gourmet retail space has witnessed rapid expansion in last five years; the space is expected to grow manifolds overthe next few years. The size of the gourmet food market in India is Rs 6,500 crore, growing at a CAGR of 20 per cent.

KIT: Gourmet food market in India

    The payment industry is witnessing a new revolution where mobile readers that plug into a cell phone&rsquo;s head set jack are replacing traditional Electronic Data Capture (EDC) machines and the manual card imprinters.

The Strategist Quiz (#250)

You Don&rsquo;T Need A Godfather: Create Your Own Success by Elango R.

The top 10 business bestsellers

Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India (HMSI), the Indian subsidiary of Honda Motor Company, last year grew the fastest among two-wheeler companies in the country &mdash; at double the rate logged by the industry.

Honda hopes to vroom its way up in bottom segment

&ldquo;Step aside, lady! The man, too, needs his time before the mirror.&rdquo; That&rsquo;s what, the makers of personal grooming products would like to believe, is a routine exchange across homes in urban India. For, they are betting big on bringing the country&rsquo;s male population in their fold with products designed specifically for men, across categories like hair care, skin care and deodorants &mdash; the last being a category that has seen quite a bit of action lately.

Deo-drama hots up for men

Nestle&rsquo;s acquisition of Pfizer&rsquo;s infant nutrition business has put the spotlight on a category that holds promise in a country where nutritional needs of young children is rapidly gaining ground.

Nestle seals its position in baby foods with Pfizer arm buy

We are planning to buy our first car, within a budget of Rs 5 lakh, for a monthly commute of around 200 km. We would like a fuel efficient car with low maintenance cost. Please suggest a suitable vehicle for us.

First wheels

How to breach the right to privacy? Let me count the ways&hellip; Along with every other minority group I belong to, here&rsquo;s another: in a universe of tech-savvy, click-happy downloaders, I belong to one of the most exclusive clubs in the world: those who haven&rsquo;t seen the Singhvi CD.

Transparency versus privacy

In George Orwell&rsquo;s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Big Brother uses the &ldquo;thought police&rdquo; to prevent &ldquo;thought crime&rdquo;, or illegal thought. Any resemblance to the West Bengal government&rsquo;s way of promoting what it calls &ldquo;free thinking&rdquo; is purely coincidental.

Lest they make mistakes

Veena S Balachander was an acknowledged master and innovator, but he was also a bit of a stormy petrel.

Highly strung

In 1987, Macmillan published a splendid book called PO PO Principle: Survival Guide to Office Politics. It appeared around the time management literature was replete with such titles as In Search of Excellence, memoirs by Lee Iacocca and many earnest management tomes on leadership and so on, and was the publishing equivalent of passing wind audibly at a formal dinner party.

Sycophancy, Inc

Sitting in his hotel room in Malaysia, golfer Jyoti Randhawa has just come back from a hard day&rsquo;s work on the greens. It has been a lacklustre two years for him, but he has bounced back with two top-20 finishes in his last three tournaments, the Malaysian Open, the Panasonic Open in India and the Thailand Golf Championship. His mind is, however, occupied with something else: come August, Randhawa will take part in the trap event of the pre-national shooting championship.

Widening the range

While pacing the streets to make his sales quota, a sales professional must pause to refuel. Experienced salesman Samil Malhotra identifies 10 eateries in Mumbai not far from major office areas where the food is good, varied, plentiful, quick to arrive and, above all, light on the pocket: no more than Rs 100 for a full meal.

Mumbai masala

Producing wine is a joy and selling it a pain &mdash; ask any winemaker and wine company. To produce wine you&rsquo;ve got to have good grapes, good processing facilities and a good winemaker to help turn the fruit into something you would be proud to serve. Of course, most of all you&rsquo;ve got to have &ldquo;Vitamin M&rdquo;: loads of money, to pay for the setup and the grapes and the expertise.

It's a pain to sell wine

Levon Aronyan and Vladimir Kramnik are playing an exhibition match at the Zurich chess club. Oddly, this is a record with two players rated above 2,800 in matchplay for the first time. Kramnik-Kasparov, Kramnik-Topalov, Anand-Kramnik and Anand-Topalov have all 2,800-plus players but never both at the time of a given match.

Chess (#998)

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