Consumers play a critical role in deciding the future of companies by their choice of purchase and opinion towards various brands of products. Therefore, marketing organizations have to conduct consumer research regularly to know their choice and preferences before purchase and post-purchase response. This makes the marketing organization improve the quality of their goods and services based on customer’s expectations and post-purchase satisfaction.

This issue commences with the paper, “Cognitive Dissonance and Purchase Involvement in the Consumer Behavior Context”, by Babu P George and Manoj Edward who examine how the degree of personal involvement in a particular purchase decision effects the information needed to reduce cognitive dissonance associated with that purchase. It is proposed by the authors that to overcome the cognitive dissonance, more supportive information is needed, as compared to dissonance associated with low involvement purchase.

The second paper, “Determining Relationship Marketing Instruments”, by Che Aniza Binti Che Wel and Jamil Bojei, aims to explore and empirically test the dimensions of Relationship Marketing Instruments (RMIs) that are appropriate in managing customer relationships. It first examines the concepts of RMIs and its important dimensions followed by reports on the construction and validation of the measure of RMIs. Past literature on this topic had hypothesized five dimensions of RMIs; however, an exploratory factor analysis discovered that RMIs consists of eight dimensions.

The third paper titled, “Consumer Behavior from a Social Communication Perspective: A Research on Young Adults”, by Figen Ebren, focuses on consumer attitude within a group and concepts of social and functional benefits residing in the purchase and ownership of products. The ideas of identifying and measuring consumer tendencies in this regard are relatively new constructs. This study contrasts status-seeking and role-relaxed consumers across social influence and personal factors.

The fourth paper titled, “Involvement Constructs and Paths to Persuasion Models in Decision Making by a Retail Buyer”, by Ramesh Krishnan and Monika Kothari, reflects that there is a need for a model unique to the retailer’s buying behavior and aims to address the issue by giving a new direction to this discipline. The primary purpose of this paper is to assess the involvement constructs and paths to persuasion model in decision making by a retail buyer, especially for a new product introduction decision. Two well-known models in consumer behavior—Elaboration Likelihood model and Heuristic and Systematic Information Processing model have been used to study the retailer’s buying behavior.

The fifth paper titled, “Impact of Service Quality on Customer Loyalty, Commitment and Trust in Indian Banking Sector”, by Sandip Ghosh Hazra and Kailash B L Srivastava, aims to examine the relationship of service quality with customer loyalty, commitment and trust from the customers’ perspective in the Indian banking industry. Implications of the study show that banks should go for loyalty programs and provide better quality services in order to retain customers and get their commitment.

The sixth paper of this issue, “Managing Service Quality: An Empirical Study on Internet Banking”, by Sunayna Khurana, focuses on identifying customer preferences towards on-line banking and finds out various service quality dimensions that affect customer satisfaction in internet banking. Efficiency, responsiveness, fulfillment, privacy of personal information and easiness to use were found to be core service quality dimensions in internet banking.

This issue concludes with a case study, “Enduring Relationship” by T Frank Sunil Justus and B Karthikeyan which analyzes the sales promotion program to build a customer relationship endeavor and the intervening marketing communication scenario to gear itself to meet the threat of competition.

-- B Shafiulla
Consulting Editor