Creating Desire for ‘Undesirables’ by subverting Means-End Chain

Purpose and meaning have always been fundamental to human and human institutions. In current times, “purpose” is actively researched by academic scholars and practiced by businesses. Purpose and values supersede product features or price in forming deeper connections with consumers by targeting emotional triggers. This paper, with its focus on alcohol beverage industry, studies how these brands target the innate need of humans to reach their terminal values or higher-order purpose in life to sell their products, consumption of which is associated with both health and social issues. Analysis of the selected alcohol beverage advertisements shows how marketers cleverly shift attention from the product attributes to consumers’ values, thus skipping the steps of Means-End chain. These personal values help in the attainment of one’s purpose (the reason for existence beyond oneself) ensuring satisfaction and contentment at an emotional level. In a category where brand preference is key, people’s motivation for selecting a particular brand they drink might be closely related to the underlying personal values.
View Paper

E-commerce: A Gateway to Prosperity of Rural Youth in India

Mobile communications and advancement in information and communication technology has made a significant impact on socio economic culture of India. It has not only contributed to the growth of industries related to E-commerce but has also benefitted significantly, the end consumers with reduction in travel costs, delivery of better products at lower price, generation of job opportunities, and increase in market efficiency. The social benefits of mobile connectivity and E-commerce could be the reach and access to communication to rural India, stimulation of local content related to health, finance, education and agriculture. Mobile communications and E-commerce are very pertinent in this era as leads to a synergistic effect. Growth opportunities are generated to serve the rural masses and give a positive a flip to the economy. In fact, in the current parlance when we relook in the rural markets we find that it has a huge potential in terms of E-commerce in alignment with the Government policies and the outcome being synchronization with marketing and distribution network. In the current parlance it is tough to penetrate in the rural remote masses where there is no internet and a tough game to create a demand. Innovative logistics network is conceived by the rural E-commerce startups. Positive willingness to buy is created with E-commerce app to the customer buying groceries or medicines at chemist shops. To come up to the expectations of rural demand, E-commerce firms have to communicate with rural consumers in their local language to sell their products. Hence rural youth through training can create linkage in E-commerce transactions in rural India.
View Paper

The Union Budget 2020-21: A Mixed Bag of Cheers and Tears

View Paper

An Empirical Investigation of the Volatility Spill-over and Asymmetries between Nifty Index and Rupee-Dollar Exchange Rate

The present study is an attempt to investigate the conditional volatility of returns of the two major segments of Indian financial markets viz. Re/$ Exchange Rate and Nifty Index Stock Index using GARCH (p,q) methodology. The period of the study has been taken to be April 2007-March 2017 and the data has been collected as monthly closing prices of the two variables, namely rupee dollar exchange rate and NSE Nifty. The analysis has been carried on first differenced (log transformed) prices. For studying the spill-over of volatility from a market to another, squared residuals (after standardization) from another market have been included as variance regressors. Further to find out whether or not there was any asymmetric returns of the markets under study, Threshold GARCH (T-GARCH) Model has been employed. The results of the study revealed the presence of conditional volatility of returns. The optimal model was identified as ARCH (1) when Re/$ Exchange Rate was the dependent variable while it was GARCH (1,1) when Nifty Index was taken as dependent variable. The bi-directional volatility spill-over (contemporaneous) was clearly evident by the two models and the same was captured by the variance regressors i.e. the standardized squared residuals. Further the results showed no sign of any asymmetry in volatility as reflected by the T-GARCH coefficients.
View Paper

Analysis of Surveys on International Trade in Banking Services

This paper analyses the Annual Surveys on International Trade in Banking Services of the Reserve Bank of India for the period 2013-19. It compares performance across three different categories of banks namely, Indian Banks’ Branches Operating Abroad, Indian Banks’ Subsidiaries Operating Abroad and Foreign Banks’ Branches Operating in India. Using trend and percentage analysis, the paper portrays various parameters graphically. The analysis demonstrates that the Foreign Banks in India perform better than the Indian banks abroad. The paper suggests compliance with BASEL-III norms and prudential regulations along with better technological compliance for more competitive performance by the Indian counterparts in future.
View Paper

Fiscal Decit and Ination in India and China: A Comparative Analysis

View Paper