99 research outputs found
Advanced Chemical Industries’ Shwapno Initiative: A Bridge Between Farmers and Urban Consumers
No full textMr. Asif Iqbal, Chief Operating Officer of Shwapno (brand name of Advanced Chemical Industries (ACI) Logistics Limited, a subsidiary of ACI), stood at the window of his Dhaka office one afternoon of January 2010. He had just returned from a meeting in which ACI’s Chairman, Managing Director, Executive Director (Agri-businesses), and Executive Director (Consumer Brands) had announced that Shwapno, a chain of 32 retail outlets, would expand by more than 100 countrywide retail outlets by January 2011, to address everyday household needs of consumers.
This news greatly pleased Mr. Iqbal, who had been one of the creators of the Shwapno supply-chain concept. As car horns blared in consistent cacophony outside his office, Mr. Iqbal envisioned the Shwapno outlets that would collect fresh materials from rural areas, far removed from the streets of Dhaka. Millions of farmers scattered across Bangladesh spent their days in doubt as to whether they could sell their products at a fair price, or at all, even if they had bumper production in their fields. Most of the farmers, fisherman, and meat producers of the country were victim to typical interest business Dadan, a business system in Bangladesh in which middlemen purchase produce from farmers at a low price and sell it at a high price to consumers. Lots of vegetables grew moldy in rural areas, because farmers did not find enough buyers who would buy their goods, whereas city dwellers paid extra to meet their vegetable needs. Additionally, poor transportation infrastructure contributed to inefficient flow of agricultural goods from rural to urban areas.
Producers were on one extreme end of the value chain, and consumers were on the other extreme. A shopper in an urban area often lost his or her interest in shopping in the market, due to untidy ambiance, such as muddy floors, insufficient space to move, unhygienic arrangement of products, the bargaining process, and inconsistent pricing. Even though the market was flooded with a wide range of products, a large portion of the population, especially farmers and end-users, were deprived of an efficient and convenient retail process. Producers did not get appropriate prices for their production and consumers invariably were deceived by sellers, who often sold inferior goods, inaccurately measured goods, and so on.
Understanding this gap in the value chain, ACI had initiated to establish a new business, namely Shwapno, to eliminate the gap, uproot the cartel, and ensure reasonable prices for both farmers and consumers. The objective of this subsidiary was to engage in the business of buying, selling, importing, and exporting of agri-products directly to consumers. The company, a unit of ACI Group, claimed that the venture would also ensure fair prices for farmers, who often got poor returns on their yields, mainly due to market manipulation. The ACI’s business decision to add at least 100 retail outlets throughout the country over the year would bring a number of challenges. Mr. Iqbal and his team would need to decide how to procure produce and create a viable strategy to build outlets.Full Tex
Factors Influencing Bike Purchase Decisions: A Study of Consumers in Bangladesh
No full textBangladesh is an emerging market of motorbikes. Here, poor infrastructures, highly income variation of people, large family members, different uses of bikes, and finally the emerging market of bikes stimulate the need for studying about bike users. Thus, the study is designed to take part the theoretical understanding of homogeneity of Bangladeshi consumers and its impact on bike purchasing. The results should assist marketers to know the common traits of Bangladeshi consumers who consider these in buying bikes. A conceptual homogeneity framework has been examined through the SEM with workable questionnaires. So results obtained prop up the conceptual framework showing that all consumers consider the factors such as exterior, convenience, performance, safety, economic aspect, attitude to mark, sale service, after sale service, and country of origin in case of bike purchasing. Marketer should, therefore, use the findings for new brand building, brand extension, market extensions of motorbikes in Bangladesh.No Full Tex
How do Muslim Consumers Arrive at Halal Purchase Decisions in Online Food Consumption Context?
No full textJust like any other religious groups, Muslim consumers increasingly buy food online. Although purchase decision making around Halal food is known in conventional brick-and-mortar store environment, not much is known about Muslim consumers’ purchase behaviour of Halal foods in online context. The purpose of this study is therefore to explore how Muslim consumers meet their Halal expectations when purchasing food online. Adopting a qualitative phenomenological approach, 15 in-depth interviews were conducted with Muslim consumers in Australia who regularly purchase food online. The prominent themes emerged from the qualitative analysis included“Islamic values”, “sources of food items” and “publicly available information”which are the prominent ways for Muslim consumers to meet their Halal expectations in online context. These findings contribute to the food marketing, retailing and religious marketing literature particularly in online shopping context, and suggest some insightful managerial implications for grocery retailers, food marketers and fast-food retailers serving Muslim consumers.Full Tex
Understanding the role of packaging elements on buying detergent powder in Dhaka City: A study on Bangladesh
No full textPackaging acts as the salient salesman for tangible products. The verbal and nonverbal elements of packaging perform as the tool of sale promotion because of changing self-service and changing consumer's lifestyle. So, it performs a significant role in creating marketing communication and influencing consumer's purchase decision in detergent industry like other industry. Thus the paper aims to know the role of packaging on buying detergent powder in Bangladesh. Considering the impact of various elements of packaging on purchasing detergent powder, a conceptual framework was developed by extensive literature review and tested by using structural equation modeling taking 200 usable questionnaires. The result shows six components of packaging: Packing Color, Background Image, Font Style, Wrapper Design, Printed Information, and Packing Innovation that have impacts on purchase decision of detergent powder in Dhaka City.No Full Tex
Acculturation and apparel store loyalty among immigrants in Western countries
No full textWestern countries have experienced a steady increase in the number of immigrants since 2000 and these immigrants appear to be a sizeable market segment for apparel retailers in Western host countries owing to their acculturation. This study investigates how acculturation of immigrants drives their loyalty to apparel stores in Western countries. Three hundred and sixty usable responses obtained from South Asian immigrants living in Australia were analysed using PLS-SEM, non-linear variance-based SEM, and fsQCA. The results showed that immigrants’ acculturation enhances their loyalty to Australian apparel stores, whereas immigrants’ ethnocentrism reduces their loyalty as well as mediates the impact of ethnic community participation on their store loyalty. Ethnic community participation further weakens the association between acculturation and store loyalty. This study contributes to consumer behaviour literature and retailing in the context of immigrants’ acculturation. It provides implications for retailers interested in creating a loyal customer base among immigrants in Western countries.No Full Tex
How do electronic word of mouth practices contribute to mobile banking adoption?
No full textMobile banking (m-banking) is the fastest growing and most cost-effective channel for delivering banking services. Electronic word of mouth (eWOM) plays a crucial role in the success of e-commerce. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to investigate a comprehensive moderated mediated mechanism for enhancing m-banking adoption behavior through positive eWOM triggers using the elaboration likelihood model (ELM). Argument Quality, valence, consistency and volume were considered eWOM triggers, and the conceptual model also included initial trust in m-banking as a mediator and consumer involvement in m-banking as a moderator. A total of 1153 useable surveys completed by the Indian users of social networking websites were used for analysis. The findings showed that of the triggers, argument quality, valence, and consistency enhance intention to adopt m-banking. These effects were mediated by initial trust in m-banking. The mediation effects of initial trust between valence – Intention varied between high and low consumer involvement in m-banking. These findings make several contributions to the literature on marketing communication, particularly to eWOM research and ELM theory. Practically, this study provides several recommendations to banks about how to use positive eWOM for motivating consumers to adopt m-banking.No Full Tex
Privacy concerns in e‐commerce: A multilevel meta‐analysis
No full textWhilst the rapid advancement of technology in the 21st century has facilitated the online collection, storage, retrieval, manipulation, and transmission of individuals' personal information, it has also led to a concomitant rise in privacy concerns amongst e-commerce users. Although privacy concerns have received considerable attention in the e-commerce literature, to date, empirical research has tended to report somewhat erratic and inconsistent findings in the context of consumer privacy. Accordingly, the relationships between the antecedents, privacy concerns, and the outcome variables in e-commerce contexts remains unclear. To remedy such deficiencies in the literature, this study adopts the meta-analytic approach to gather and make sense of the inconsistent and mixed empirical findings reported in the literature. The findings show that risk perceptions trigger privacy concerns while benefit perceptions, familiarity, reputation, privacy policy, and trust mitigate privacy concerns which in turn affect customer attitude and usage of e-commerce platforms. To investigate the possible reasons for inconsistent findings, we performed a moderation analysis which suggests that methodological moderators, that is, type of article, research methods, and sample type; and contextual moderators, i.e. country where the study was carried out, and gender dominance in a sample set, can cause inconsistencies in the findings. Theoretically, this meta-analysis contributes to the Antecedents; Privacy Concerns; Outcome variables (APCO) Model, and the literature on consumer privacy in the context of e-commerce. Practically, the findings provide guidelines to e-commerce businesses to effectively address customers' privacy concerns.No Full Tex
Binary and ternary quasifission induced by shell effects at near barrier energy in heavy nuclear systems
No full textThe study of the true ternary fission (simultaneous decay in three fragments of similar mass) with formation of a heavy third fragment due to strong shell effects has received new interest among nuclear physicists. It is a very rare
process which has been studied both theoretically and experimentally since several decades, but still it is quite far from proper understanding.
This PhD thesis concerns with the experimental observation of true ternary decay in three reactions. Specifically, at 195 MeV, at 193 MeV and at 193 and 230
MeV reactions were studied at the K130 Cyclotron accelerator of the University of Jyv\ddot{\mbox {a}}skyl\ddot{\mbox {a}}, Finland. The first two reactions populating the same compound nucleus were investigated for possible entrance channel effects, whereas for the last system, , two different bombarding energies have been provided to investigate the effect of excitation energy of the compound system. Four time-of-flight (TOF) arms coupled with six telescopes of silicon detectors and a beam monitoring system constitute the complete experimental setup. Two dimensional velocity coincidence maps were built from TOF arms. The presence of cluster patterns in the two-velocity maps for all the reactions is the main observation of this work. Another outcome of the present investigation is the consistent overlap between the tripartitions that reproduce the data in the companion reactions and , and in the reactions at 193 and 230 MeV. These two findings give support to the occurrence of the simultaneous three-body decay. The comparison between the rate for binary and ternary decays has also been achieved by calculating the ratio of such events corrected for the efficiency. These ratios are quite striking because in spontaneous fission the simultaneous ternary decay is several orders of magnitude less abundant. In the case of and , true ternary fission is even from 2 to 4 times more abundant than binary fission
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