Word-of-mouth plays an important role in advertising the services. As services have disadvantage of intangibility, where customer cannot see, touch and feel unlike products, word-of-mouth helps service companies to spread positive message through satisfied customers and cost of such communication is negligible. Dharam Prakash Arya, in the paper, "Advertisement Effectiveness: Role of `Word-of-Mouth' in Success of Educational Institutes in Non-Metro Cities", has endeavoured to find out the significance of word-of-mouth in admissions to various educational institutes and also to find the attitude of students towards various advertisement tools and their effectiveness by educational institutes in rural India. The author finds that institutes have adopted advertisement tools which they used in metros. Students in rural market pay greater attention to posters, wall paintings, hoardings, newspaper advertisements, while institutions keep focusing on advertisements through the leading news channels, which may not be accessible to the prospects. Students in non-metros weigh the recommendations (word-of-mouth) more than any advertisement, while in metros, students tend to enquire more on telephone, the Internet or published information. Thus, the marketers should understand the importance of a more customized media planning, and fine tune their campaigns accordingly. Word-of-mouth plays an important role in the overall success of an institution in a rural marketplace.

Today, promotion through the Internet is practiced by many organizations. Companies are promoting products, services and ideas through the Internet. As more and more traffic is getting added to existing internet users, the Internet will emerge as a major tool for promotion. There are two benefits in using internet as a promotion tool: one, the message reaches very fast at lesser cost and the other, message can be sent to the target customer. Timira Shukla, in the paper, "Factors Affecting Internet Marketing Campaigns with Reference to Viral and Permission Marketing", discusses the problems marketers face when implementing Viral Marketing (VM) and Permission Marketing (PM) and investigates the key factors affecting consumers' reactions to marketers' initiatives. Using the results from factor analysis, the author has identified eight factors that are important in viral and permission marketing. These factors include various components, such as believability, public relations, loyalty, data capture, penetration, transmission convenience, turnout, humor level, informativeness, shock level, exposure, reachability, awareness, campaign persistence and reasons for transmission.

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is a sign of economic growth of a particular country or a region. Attracting FDI involves proactive government policy initiatives in deregulating industries and welcoming private participation, both domestic and international. International participation is through FDI which implies that the foreign investor exerts a significant degree of influence on the management of resident enterprise in the other economy. P Srinivasan, M Kalaivani and P Ibrahim, in the paper, "FDI and Economic Growth in the ASEAN Countries: Evidence from Cointegration Approach and Causality Test", have employed Johansen's Cointegration and VECM to examine the causal relationship between FDI and economic growth in ASEAN economies for the period 1970-2007. The authors suggest that the enhancement of country's economic growth performance is much needed to attract FDI flows rather than liberalized FDI-oriented policy efforts. The authors also suggest that the governments should formulate adequate liberalized policy frameworks to attract stable foreign investment inflows. In addition, they should adopt effective policy measures that would substantially enlarge and diversify economic base, improve local skills, build up a stock of human capital recourses capabilities, enhance economic stability and liberalize the market in order to attract as well as benefit from long-term FDI inflows.

Production and marketing are the two important functions of pursuit for a successful enterprise. Though many organization are successful in bringing out the best quality products, lack of effective marketing practices pushes them towards failure. The case is more relevant with tiny and small scale enterprises. Srabanti Mukherjee, in the paper, "Initial Marketing Design to Enter the Pickle Business: A Case Study on an Aspiring Women Group in Hooghly District", focuses on women SHGs (Self-Help Groups) of that district in West Bengal. The main objectives of the study are to know the likeliness of pickle by local consumers, most preferred delivery mode, acceptance of the price and the best possible combination which provides maximum utility to the local customers and the motivation to buy the product. The author concludes that small SHGs are important in terms of financial and social escalation in emerging economies by means of socioeconomic empowerment of the women belonging to lower strata. The author says that efforts are needed for effective implementation of the schemes of the local SHGs. Nonetheless, these groups are characteristically deficient in the planning facet. Proper training has to be given to handle the product line and mix strategies.

-- K Rajanath
Consulting Editor