Ivan Kovač

Impact of personal service on customer satisfaction in FMCG retail in Croatia

Globalisation and fierce competition forced companies to realize that satisfied customers are the key to long-term business success. Therefore, customer satisfaction has to be a strategic goal and a core value of the companys culture. Also, the customer satisfaction measurement has to be an indicator of everyones contribution to the achievement of the goals if companies want to deliver superior service to their customers. The benefits of customer satisfaction are well known in practice as well as in marketing and management literature. Companies that have more satisfied customers experience higher economic returns and customer loyalty. Customer satisfaction and customer loyalty are increasingly becoming important factors in modern retailing – a market characterized by slow growth and intense competition. Analysis of the retail trade in Croatia showed that it is one of the most developed, most competitive and dynamic economic sectors in the country. The main characteristics of the Croatian retail market are concentration, internationalisation and consolidation the same as in developed markets. The latest development trend is moving toward the construction of modern shopping centres that provide various shopping services and entertainment in one place. Retailers seek to respond more efficiently and more effectively to the needs of customers by managing relationship with customers and offering them superior range and quality of assortment and service. The goal of this paper is to explore impact of personal service on customer satisfaction levels in FMCG retail in Croatia. The results of the research indicated that the level and quality of personal service have a significant impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty but the impact of non-personal service on loyalty is even stronger. The research also provides empirical evidence of positive but weak and non-significant link between customer satisfaction and salesperson’s work satisfaction. However, it is necessary to systematically manage customer satisfaction of the both external and internal customer. The results of the research have shown that retail chains are aware of the importance of CRM strategies and larger use of CRM software for this purpose can be expected in future.

The analysis of the international trade and specialisation of the Croatian counties

The paper analyses international trade of goods of the Republic of Croatia by counties from 2001 to 2010. The analysis determines the significance of particular counties in the international trade of goods. Beside level of international trade, other indicators like imports dependence, exports propensity, openness and regional structure of exports are used in order to determine importance of international trade for each of individual county. Significant regional differences are found in the international trade pattern in various counties. The paper also analyses the exports concentration and specialisation of Croatian counties. Apart from exports structure defined by NKD 2007 classification, paper further deals with specialisation according to technology structure of exports. In the concluding chapter, the paper explores the connection between export propensity of particular counties, specialisation and the economic development. In accordance to the recent theoretical and empirical research, in the case of Croatian counties, a significant correlation between exports features, specialisation pattern and openness on one side and economic development on the other side is also found. Counties specialised in exports of high technology products are usually more developed than counties specialised in exports of lower technology products.

Nonlinear Growth Models for Modelling Time Series of Groundwater Nitrate Concentrations

In this paper, a novel approach of modelling time series of nitrate concentrations in drinking water by nonlinear growth functions is proposed. An almost constant increase in the average values of nitrate concentrations occurred at the Vinokovščak wellfield in the county of Varaždin, Croatia, in the period between 1998 and 2013. Our hypothesis was that the time series would be well adjusted to the nonlinear growth function with asymptotic properties after smoothing performed by the moving average method. We used a general growth model which does not have asymptotic properties and the logistic, Gompertz and Richards functions which do have asymptotic properties. Last three growth functions were modified based on the knowledge of a constant presence of basic nitrate concentrations in the drinking water before growth. The fit of growth curves to experimental data was assessed using R2 and Aikake’s information criterion. The modified growth functions gave the best fit to the smoothed time series of nitrate concentrations with R2 ranging from 0.9960 to 0.9986.

Level of Marketing Orientation Among Croatian Beverage Producers and Distributors

Market orientation has been a topic of an academic research interest for many years. It has been broadly acknowledged that market orientation is strongly associated with business performance. However, past studies often found that majority of the companies did not apply marketing concept to the full extent. The purpose of this paper is to investigate a level of market orientation of companies that produce and distribute beverage products on the Croatian market. Starting from the assumption that marketing conception and marketing orientation of a company represents a fundamental concept for making „better“ products and delivering a superior value offering aimed at needs of the target segments and thus is a critical part of competitive capabilities and a generator of advantage on market, in a hypothesis made for the purpose of empirical research authors tried to specifically find out the degree in which market orientation contributes toward competitive performance in the sector and following that to find out which is the dominant generic competitive strategy and which are the most effective components of marketing strategies employed in the sector. Research has been conducted on the sample of managers working in marketing & sales or as CEOs in companies that produce and distribute beverage products. Research resulted with a wealth of data describing selected elements and degree of market orientation as well as most frequent elements of dominant marketing strategies employed throughout the sector. The results of research are even more interesting as the beverage producing and distributing sector is at present time under strong competitive pressure as a result of several major market trends: (1) consumer segments becoming more heterogeneous, (2) growth of retail market concentration and thus rise of power of leading retail chains in the channels of distribution which resulted with the shift of control over marketing mix, and (3) more intensive value offering as a result of growing marketing capabilities of domestic producers and further market penetration of world’s most famous beverage brands. Therefore, this paper represents valuable scientific addition to the marketing knowledge and could prove to be useful in further analysis and development of competitive capabilities based on efficient marketing strategies.