Editorial

Citation

Shainesh, G. (2012), "Editorial", Journal of Indian Business Research, Vol. 4 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/jibr.2012.41304aaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Indian Business Research, Volume 4, Issue 1

I am pleased to welcome you to the inaugural issue of 2012! This issue also marks the beginning of JIBR’s fourth volume. In the last three years, the JIBR has been successful in attracting papers from leading researchers and professionals based in India and abroad. We look forward to continued support from scholars researching various aspects of India’s business, economy and society and business leaders for their insights.

The current issue carries four research papers focusing on diverse themes namely, employee turnover in the software services industry, churn analysis in telecom services, gender differences in consumer brand relationships and predicting preference for financial investment offerings.

The first paper titled “Linking turnover reasons to family profiles for IT/BPO employees in India” by Scott L. Boyar, Reimara Valk, Carl P. Maertz and Ranjan Sinha focuses on employee attrition which is a serious concern faced by India’s rapidly growing software services industry. Using qualitative and quantitative analysis, the authors identified the following six reasons for employee turnover – family situation, travel distance, job content, work-related stress, relationship with friends, and managerial support to explore if family profiles impacted family-related and work-related turnover reasons. The research findings indicate that managerial support, job content and work-related stress were the key reasons for employee turnover while family-related reasons did not emerge to be significant reasons in explaining attrition. The authors recommend that organizations can address employee attrition by increasing the level of managerial support provided to employees, providing advancement opportunities and by creating a challenging, yet less stressful work environment.

The second paper by M. Geetha and Jensolin Abitha Kumari focuses on another type of attrition, namely customer churn. In their paper titled “Analysis of churn behavior of consumers in Indian telecom sector”, they analyse the usage pattern of Non Revenue Earning Customers (NREC) who cause revenue churn in the company and are susceptible to churn in the near future. The usage pattern of these NREC customers were analyzed to predict their propensity to defect and prevent customer churn. Analysis of longitudinal revenue data reveals that consumers with overall usage revenue per minute greater than Rs. 0.75 and greater usage of value added services are susceptible to churn. Also based on the nature of calls, subscribers making more calls to other networks as compared to the home network are susceptible to churn. The findings will be helpful to telecom service providers in developing proactive strategies to prevent customer churn.

Arvind Sahay, Nivedita Sharma and Krishnesh Mehta focus on gender differences in consumer brand relationship in their paper titled “Role of affect and cognition in consumer brand relationship: exploring gender differences”. They explore gender differences in consumer brand relationships with respect to affect and cognition and also the difference between genders with respect to the impact of variables like age and influence of peers and family on consumer brand relationships. The study employs Resonance Field Imaging (RFI™) approach to collect data from a small sample of respondents. This data is combined with depth interviews and findings from the literature to generate propositions on the impact of gender, age and peer and family influence on the level and mix of affect and cognition in brand relationships. They find that for SEC A and B customers in the age range of 18-35, females’ relationships with brands tend to be more affect based and males’ relationships with brands tend to be more cognition based and that these vary with age and the nature of family and peer influence. The findings of this research, though preliminary in nature, help understand how men and women behave with their most preferred brand under the influence of social variables, e.g. peers and family. Marketers can utilise the findings develop a nuanced approach which recognizes the similarities and differences between male and female consumers to develop better marketing approaches required for the two genders. The findings will also help marketers manage marketing communications and guide product development.

The final paper titled “Predictors of preference for financial investment products using CART analysis” by Shalini Kalra, Nand Dhamija and Ashok Arora analyses demographic, socio-economic and psychographic variables to understand the investors’ preferences. They used the Classification and Regression Tree (CART) methodology determine whether psychographic variables were better predictors than demographic and socio-economic variables in understanding the individual investor’s preference for the investment alternatives. Psychographic variables emerged as the most important predictors in case of investment products with higher degree of risk while demographic and socio-economic variables emerged as the most important variables for investments with lower degree of risk. When the sample was divided based on occupation profile (government and non-government), for both the fixed returns based instruments and the non-fixed instruments, psychographic variables emerged as most important predictors. Financial service providers can gain by understanding the predictors of preference for financial products for customer attraction as well as retention, gaining customer trust and improve marketing productivity.

We do hope you will enjoy reading these papers. On behalf of the editorial team, I wish you all a very Happy and Successful 2012!

G. Shainesh