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An examination of total quality management implementation projects in the healthcare industry is reported. Illustrations of the projects show how projects are predominantly managerial issues‐oriented, rather than emphasizing medical/clinical aspects. The issue of competition between healthcare and managerial perspectives is raised. The five cases reported were undertaken as part of a Community Excellence Initiative in north‐eastern Pennsylvania which aimed to make the region more attractive to relocating business. Looks at implications of the projects for the future.

This study is an assessment of the impact of quality management training on workplace experience in a republic of the former Soviet Union. This preliminary study indicates that initial focus of quality in the republic is “conformance to specifications, and the reliance on improved engineering and operations”. While the concept of quality in an individual context is prized and recognized, when it comes to the collective, the emphasis is on quantity over quality. The immediate need is for training in principles, tools and practice of continuous improvement for a broad base of the population. The findings are particularly significant as they have implications for policy makers responsible for guiding the fledgling market economy that is developing in Kyrgyzstan in particular and other central Asian nations in general, to world class competitiveness.

Time to implementation is an essential measure of success in the implementation of ISO 14000 in organizations across the spectrum. Time delays are directly correlated to cost overruns and erosion of competitive advantage that is expected from successful implementation. A framework is developed that seeks to identify management practices that result in faster implementation of environmental management systems leading to certification. This paper identifies a set of management actions that impact on the speed of successful implementation of ISO 14000 environmental management systems to provide future managerial guidance. Management actions in the form of top management commitment, determination of customer driven specifications of quality and environmental friendliness, use of analytical tools, use of statistical process control techniques, support for “do it right the first time”, snowballing training experience across the entire workforce, cross‐functional teams, improvements in communication within teams and across the organization, and qualifications and quality of implementation team members are among those investigated. Size of the organization, size of the core implementation team, newness of the project and industry category, and impact on market performance is used for purpose of classification.

Retention of existing customers is a priority for businesses to survive and prosper. The high cost of acquisition of new customers in a mature market has pushed organizations into actively seeking to build and sustain long‐term relationships with customers. Such relationships are strong enough to provide a substantial barrier to switching business over to competition in most cases. The transition of a neutral or negative relationship into positive territory is based on changes in one or more of the cognitive, affective and behavioral dimensions of the relationship. Information exchanges between an organization and its customers play a significant role in such a change. The nature and scope of relationship with a customer changes, as the customer needs evolve in the course of the product life cycle in the customer’s industry. A framework merging the concepts of “customer relationship management” and “product life cycle” into “customer relationship life cycle” is proposed.

This paper attempts to interpret the Bartholomew (1973) index of mobility in terms of a directional mobility index based on the one-step expected states of movement corresponding to a specific state of transition matrix. A partial ordering of directional mobility of a general state of transition matrices, referred to as “upward mobility favoring sequential averaging (UMFSA),” is proposed using the algebraic equivalent of the generalized Lorenz ordering of expected states. When the underlying mobility depends on the initial distribution of the states, using a Bayesian approach, the indices are reexamined for a general class of matrices. This enables us to interpret the Prais (1955) and Bibby (1975) mobility index in this framework.

A recent trend in the study of poverty is to consider a relative poverty line, one that is responsive to the nature of the income distribution. We develop an axiomatic approach to the determination of an amalgam poverty line. Given a reference income (e.g., the mean or the median), the amalgam poverty line becomes a weighted average of the absolute poverty line and the reference income, where the weights depend on the policy maker’s preferences for aggregating the two components. The paper ends with an empirical illustration comparing urban and rural areas in the People’s Republic of China and India.

There is a lacuna in research work in terms of understanding how Indian IT organizations can become global brands. Benchmarking has not received much attention in marketing literature due to lack of benchmarking framework, and IT organizations are yet to make progress in benchmarking. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of brand strength on global branding by developing a conceptual benchmarking framework for Indian IT organizations.

Semi-structured in-depth interviews are conducted with thirty middle-level managers from two Indian IT organizations, two US-based global IT organizations and one UK-based leading bank, which is a customer of these IT organizations.

Results show a positive relationship between brand strength and global branding, between customer loyalty and global branding, between brand loyalty and competitive advantage and between global branding and competitive advantage. Indian IT organizations can benchmark global IT organizations to improve delivering brand promise, positioning, awareness building and authenticity toward making Indian IT organizations future ready to address the entire breadth of opportunities in the evolving world of cloud and digital.

This research helps managers with a brand strength-based benchmarking framework toward global branding of Indian IT organizations.

IT is instrumental for rapid growth of Indian’s economy. India should optimally utilize its greatest wealth, its human potential, with the latent global demand in IT through building global IT brands.

The originality of the study lies in conducting a qualitative study on global branding of Indian IT organizations and also proposing a conceptual benchmarking framework. The study further validates the model using qualitative analysis.

This study aims to explore the main features contributing towards the formation of brand loyalty among children, using a neural network topology.

The paper used an exploratory study using a semi-structured interviewed with children, psychologist and head of the school. This paper uses survey to collect data and analysed using artificial neural networks (ANNs).

Several interesting insights emerge in respect of children’s consumer behavior and, in particular, the factors of emotional authenticity, brand partnerships, brand relationship, brand salience and brand personality in the priming of children’s brand loyalty emerge as important factors.

This research uses data from Indonesia which is considered as a developing country. Further research is required in the developed country context, as this may present different perspectives. Furthermore, the sample in this study consists of children aged between 10 and 12 years, but there are many age groups into which children can be divided, e.g. below 3 years; 3-5 years; 6-8 years; 9-12 years and even 13-15 years. Hence, future research needs to include these different groups of children to gain a more complete picture of the children’s market.

A children’s market-driving strategy really should be related with the “grass roots” needs of the segment. Hence, marketers ought to spend two or three days in the company of children and continually update themselves in respect of what is happening in those children’s rapidly changing world. Additionally, marketers need to relate all their marketing activities to the building of autobiographical memory. All events, promotions and other marketing strategies should be integrated to ensure that autobiographical memory really underpins a future market as the children of the present become adults of the future.

The study contributes to the existing literature and appreciation of the various factors and the inter-relationships between them that have relevance for product longevity in the children’s market.