Anupama Vohra

Perception of physicians towards pharmaceutical promotion in India

Pharmaceutical firms spend a significant amount of their budget on promotions. Thus, it becomes imperative to study the perception of physicians, at whom a major share of these promotional efforts ...

Green Marketing: Development of Construct and Its Evolution

Marketing as a discipline has evolved over a period of time where the traditional concept imparts that goods were produced to be sold to the customers and the modern marketing states that goods are produced according to the needs and demand of the customers. The current marketing management emphasises on satisfying the needs of the customers without any environmental degradation. This green concept is building over the last decade because of consumer concern, government regulations, environmental lobbies’ pressure and social responsibilities of the corporates towards environment. Also green marketing is offering a new competitive advantage to the companies who wish to target their green consumers. The current study aims to sketch out the concept of green marketing by discussing and analysing the existing knowledge of the definitions, themes, dimensions and their components so as to frame chronologically development of the same.

Pharmaceutical retailers and promotion by pharmaceutical companies in India

PurposePharmaceutical firms target their promotion to physicians, chemists and patients. Chemists are an important entity in pharmaceutical marketing. Despite this there exists very little research on the promotional tools aimed at chemists. Thus, it becomes important for the marketers to study the perception of chemists towards the promotion tools being used by the pharmaceutical companies. The current study attempts to study the promotional tools used by pharmaceutical industry aimed at chemists. Authors also try to study the influence of these promotional tools on decisions to place orders.MethodologyA structured questionnaire was developed for collecting primary data to meet the objectives of the study. List of chemists has been compiled after obtaining the Chemist-Must-See-List from a few pharmaceutical companies operating in Delhi. In all, 250 chemists were approached through convenience sampling and 197 usable questionnaires were received.FindingsMedical representatives, gifts and schemes influence...

From active participation to engagement in online communities: Analysing the mediating role of trust and commitment

Abstract The advent of new media and the internet has brought social media to the fore of all brand communications. Marketers are looking at leveraging social media and all its capabilities to their advantage so as to build and manage customer relationships while also co-creating brand experiences. Online communities are one of the most preferred choices of marketers, from among all the tools and features that social media offers. The present study aims to understand how user’s active participation in online communities is instrumental in influencing their engagement with the community. The above relationship is tested on a sample of 203 respondents, using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM), where trust and commitment are explored as mediators. While trust is found to partially mediate the relationship between active participation and engagement, commitment acts as a full mediator. The influence of personal characteristics (membership duration, gender) is also explored as an ancillary outcome to the study.