Consumer buying behavior is a complex process which is influenced by individual, behavioral, psychological, social and other factors which affect consumer preferences. A marketing manager has to continuously study consumer lifestyle and behavioral process towards purchase decisions of various goods and services. Marketers should be competitive and enhance customer satisfaction by providing more features and after-sales services through customer relationship. Marketers, besides satisfying consumers, have to provide value additions through continuous analysis of customer expectations. Satisfied consumers have emotional and rational preferences towards products and brands and this creates customer loyalty.

This issue commences with the paper, "Local vs. Foreign Made: Are Malaysians Ethnocentric?", by Jamil Bojei, Siti Normah Awang Tuah, Aryaty Alwie and Maisarah Ahmad. As consumer ethnocentrism is a challenge to the international market this paper examines the role of globalization in buying behaviors by identifying Malaysian consumers' willingness or reluctance to purchase foreign products. A questionnaire was developed for this study.

The second paper, "A Study of Identifying the Emotional Competence of Indian Salespeople", by Sandeep Vij, Ritika Sharma and Manoj Kumar Sharma, tries to identify the dimensionality of emotional competence skills of Indian salespeople. Six emotional competence proficiencies, i.e., Ironic Perspective, Authentic Dealing, Empathy with Customers, Emotional Acceptability, Ethical Emotional Flexibility and Self-Presentations represent the emotional competence skills of the Indian salespeople. This study was conducted in the northern states of India.

The third paper, "A Study of Market Share and Factors Affecting the Choice of Cellular Service Provider Among Young Age Group of Kolkata", by Debarati Chaterjee and Ishita Chaudhuri discusses two major aspects of mobile telephone industry—the concentration of market share and identifying the most important and the least important factors affecting choice of a service provider. They have used the tools like Herfindahl Index, ANOVA and Rank score analysis.

The fourth paper, "Indian Sports Celebrities as Brand Endorsers: An Analysis Based on `Q' Score Technique", by Supriyo Patra and Saroj Kumar Datta focuses on determining the level of awareness about the Indian sports celebrities among the respondents. This paper also determines the potential of Indian sports celebrities as brand endorsers, and finally it provides guidelines to the advertisers to select the right sports celebrity.

Finally, the book titled, Connect the Dots, authored by Rashmi Bansal has been reviewed by Shailendra Dasari which discusses the success stories of ordinary individuals without having any professional qualifications from reputed institutes.

-- B Shafiulla
Consulting Editor