The objective of this paper is to assist ocean container carriers in devising effective marketing strategies to attract and retain Indian shippers. It has been achieved by letting the container carriers understand the list of criteria Indian shippers use in their carrier selection decisions along with their perceived importance. To explore the criteria, review of transportation literature, customer satisfaction survey questionnaires and review of SERVQUAL battery, telephonic interviews and focus groups were conducted. To bring out the perceived importance, a questionnaire was used. A mean score analysis was carried out to analyze the importance of each criterion along with its overall rank. On analysis, it was found that the Indian shippers use forty eight criteria in their container carrier selection decisions and out of these, low freight is the first ranked criterion and pricing flexibility is the second ranked one. Gifts and compliments is the least important criterion in the list. All the 48 criteria have been classified only under three ratings, viz., somewhat important, important and extremely important and none of them have been rated neutral or less than that. It is a premier study of this kind undertaken in India and hence is expected to open up enormous scope for future research.

The objective of this paper is to assist ocean container carriers in devising effective marketing strategies to attract and retain Indian shippers. This will be achieved by letting the container carriers understand what are the criteria Indian shippers use in their carrier selection decisions and also the amount of importance they assign to each criterion during such decision-making process. This paper deals with the subject matter in two stages. In the first stage, it explores the criteria for the selection and in the second stage, it identifies the perceived importance of each criterion. It is a shipper-only study because it addresses the subject matter only from shippers' perspective.

The initial motivation of the study was ignited by an article by Kent and Parker (1999). In the article, they stated that the future containership carrier selection researches should analyze shippers based outside the United States and investigate their perceptions on each of the 18 criteria they studied. This raised a question as to why a carrier selection study should not be carried out in India. Subsequently, in order to realize the necessity of such a study, justification was sought from two aspects. Firstly, by review of transportation literature and secondly, by scanning the environment by experience surveying.

The literature review revealed that (1) The list of criteria and the importance of each criterion are ever changing in tune with changes in time. This finding is supported by longitudinal studies conducted by Brooks (1990); Crum and Allen (1997); Premeaux (2002); (2) The list of criteria is changing from country to country; (3) Though carrier selection has been a much debated subject for more than 40 years, it is new to the Indian environment. Most of the previous studies on carrier selection have been undertaken outside India, for example, in the United States (Kent and Parker, 1999), Eastern Canada (Brooks, 1990), Taiwan (Lu, 2003), Thailand (Sirisoponsilp and Wonginta, 2003), People's Republic of China (Wong et al., 2008), etc.; and (4) Most of the studies dealt with motor carrier selection criteria and only a few addressed container carrier selection criteria.

Operations Management Journal, Indian Environment, SERVQUAL Battery, Carrier Selection Decisions, Indian Shippers, Decision Making Process, Carrier Selection Criteria, Marketing Strategy Formulation, Trucking Services, Transportation Literature, Data Collection Methods, Industrial Sectors, Marketing Strategies.