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Advances in technology over recent years made it possible to use machines and artificial intelligence to develop commercially viable solutions for companies to listen to consumers, decode the meaning, and respond accordingly. In parallel, solutions have been developed that are able to automatically track facial expressions of consumers when reacting to a given marketing stimulus.

The authors look at how marketing executives can apply these technologies to generate enhanced customer insights, providing a realistic context for future applications. The focus is on bringing researchers and managers closer to those moments of truth and our ability to understand customer emotions, emotional reaction, everyday language, and ultimately brand engagement.

The chapter covers the application of commercially viable use cases for (1) the automated measurement of emotions through facial coding to optimize advertizing and content, and (2) the use of voice coding technology to design interactive chatbots as an alternative to traditional surveys. In the outlook, the authors describe the potential that these technologies provide for future research and further use cases.

Given that the policy is rather comprehensive and detailed, this paper aims to identify some of the key features and discuss the mechanisms by which the benefits of the policy might reach all sections of society.

In this paper, we analyse India’s new education policy (NEP) and discuss how it might impact education and employment in India and the neighbourhood.

This paper believes that the NEP (2020) is likely to alter the educational landscape of India and make education accessible to all sections of society. In addition, the impact of this bill will be felt in the Indian workplace.

This paper would urge the policymakers, educationists and corporate leaders to conduct research on the benefits of the NEP in two phases. In the short run, they could study the implementation – in the long run, all three stakeholders should track the changes in the quality of graduates being produced as a result of the new policy.

This is the first known critique of the NEP (2020) written by five Indian-origin academics and practitioners, offering insight into the policy for scholars and practitioners.

Extracting suitable features to represent an image based on its content is a very tedious task. Especially in remote sensing we have high-resolution images with a variety of objects on the Earth's surface. Mahalanobis distance metric is used to measure the similarity between query and database images. The low distance obtained image is indexed at the top as high relevant information to the query.

This paper aims to develop an automatic feature extraction system for remote sensing image data. Haralick texture features based on Contourlet transform are fused with statistical features extracted from the QuadTree (QT) decomposition are developed as feature set to represent the input data. The extracted features will retrieve similar images from the large image datasets using an image-based query through the web-based user interface.

The developed retrieval system performance has been analyzed using precision and recall and F1 score. The proposed feature vector gives better performance with 0.69 precision for the top 50 relevant retrieved results over other existing multiscale-based feature extraction methods.

The main contribution of this paper is developing a texture feature vector in a multiscale domain by combining the Haralick texture properties in the Contourlet domain and Statistical features using QT decomposition. The features required to represent the image is 207 which is very less dimension compare to other texture methods. The performance shows superior than the other state of art methods.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the impact of factors derived from the unified theory of user acceptance of technology (performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, age, gender) and of those drawn from literature (perceived risk, perceived enjoyment and innovativeness) on the adoption of m-commerce in India. It also suggests implications of these for the consumer behavior theory practitioners and marketers.

Data were collected using an online survey from 321 respondents, split into two groups (high and low adoption level users) based on the usage scores of the four categories of m-commerce- location-based, transaction-based, entertainment and content delivery. Logistic regression technique was used to identify the prominent factors among the nine identified influencers to understand the differences between the two groups.

The findings of this paper are sample biasness, self-reported m-commerce adoption level, limited m-commerce categories and specific context.

Except the two factors of performance expectancy and facilitating conditions, all other variables discriminate between low and high adoption levels of m-commerce services in India. Social influence, perceived enjoyment and innovativeness were the three main factors that were found to have the most significant impact on the discrimination levels of m-commerce service users in India. Further, it was found that women and the younger generation users of m-commerce showed a greater propensity for adopting m-commerce practices.

Marketers need to focus on key factors like social influence, perceived enjoyment, perceived risk and effort expectancy to persuade the young and innovative consumer target groups increase their adoption of m-commerce services.

This is the first study of its kind to explore factors that distinguish users with low and high levels of m-commerce adoption, by taking into consideration all four categories of m-commerce (transaction-based, content delivery, location-based and entertainment). In doing so, it highlights the need for marketers to focus on factors beyond facilitating conditions and performance expectancy, to enhance the adoption of m-commerce practices.

The non-executive Chairman, Chaturvedi, must lead the Board of Directors of ICICI Bank as it deals with the adverse findings by a former Supreme Court judge against Ms. Chanda Kochhar, the former Chief Executive of the Bank. She had not disclosed a conflict of interest regarding a loan to a corporate group that had business dealings with her husband. Months earlier, the Board had exonerated her and also allowed her to retire from the Bank. Could and should the Board now reclassify Kochhar's retirement as ‘Termination for Cause’ and claw back her past bonuses?

Corporate governance; General management; Strategy

Post Graduate/MBA

Tata Group is a conglomerate having 29 listed companies with consolidated revenues of $103bn in FY2016. On October 24, 2016, Cyrus Mistry, chairman of the group has been replaced in an unceremonious way from this job, in a boardroom coup, without being given any opportunity to explain his case. This news arrived in the media between October 2016 and December 2016 and wide and public debates took place on the corporate governance practices of Tata Group. Mistry’s ouster was attributed to non-performance, unethical practices and non-compliance to Tata culture. This case presents the Tata Group performance before Mistry, at the ouster of Mistry, the major trouble points and the corporate governance activities that took place in this saga at Tata Group. The real losers in this battle were the investors who lost $12bn between October 2016 and December 2016. Many of Tata Group companies’ stocks plunged.

The students will learn corporate governance, know how a non-listed company control and govern listed entities, know the way performance of a chairman of a company has been evaluated and learn how ethical and cultural issues impact the performance of chairman of a listed company.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

CSS: 11: Strategy

In recent times, there has been a lot of research focused on performance measurement (PM) in project-based sectors. However, there are very few studies that were reported on the significance of PM in the construction sector. Keeping track of an organization in achieving organizations goals and objectives seems an important way. One of the major challenges faced by the industry is unavailable of an appropriate PM system for assessing organizational performance. Most of the PM approaches consider the traditional project triangle assessment of project success. Based on the limitations identified in existing PM models, the purpose of this paper is to develop a comprehensive PM model, i.e. Modified Project Quarter Back Rating (MPQR) applicable for construction projects.

A detailed list of performance areas as a method for PM is analyzed in the construction industry context. Also, industry-specific professionals conducted semi-structured interviews to assess whether these performance areas are sufficient to measure and understand the PM systems.

The research finding focuses on developing the MPQR model that considers both financial and non-financial areas for performance assessment to provide a holistic assessment of project performance.

MPQR model provides an opportunity to set the benchmark for overall performance for construction organizations.

The findings of the study are expected to provide guidelines to construction professionals for implementing the performance model that will improve performance in the construction industry.

The case study aims to provide students with an understanding of the challenges businesses face expanding into the home market after having an international presence through exports. It also throws light on operations in an emerging market economy – both rural and urban. The key objectives are to understand the leather footwear business operation in India, understand the challenges of expanding business in India, analyse strategies adopted to sustain and compete in India and identify the possible distribution strategies for the leather footwear business in India.

The case study focuses on Tata International Limited’s (TIL) leather and leather products business in India. The leather and leather products division was present in India since 1973 (Anand, 2020) and exported to more than 35 countries across the world (Anand, 2020). TIL did not want to miss the opportunity available in India and planned to expand its leather footwear business in the country. The company opened retail outlets in major Indian cities and an experience store in Dewas (Madhya Pradesh) in 2019. It aimed for a domestic presence along with the existing export business. However, the biggest challenge that was in front of V. Muthukumaran, head of leather products division at TIL, was how to go ahead with the idea of domestic expansion (Anand, 2020). Should the company expand the market through sister companies (Westside and Tata CliQ) in India? How and in what way should TIL plan for going through Westside and Tata CLiQ? Should Muthukumaran think of either the brick-and-mortar route or the online route or both?

This case study is designed for use in undergraduate and graduate early-stage programmes. This case study is primarily designed for use in Master of Business Administration and/or Bachelor of Business Administration programmes. The case study is ideal for courses on understanding the expansion in the domestic market, strategy, retail and international marketing. The teaching note discusses theoretical frameworks such as external environment analysis and SWOT analysis to devise distribution strategies. The case study mapped the distribution channel and decision alternatives for the company.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 8: Marketing.

The engineering education accreditation (EEA) is a principal quality assurance mechanism. However, at many education institutions, the most labor-intensive work of EEA process is accomplished manually. Without the support of computer and information technology, the EEA process leads to high labor intensity, low work efficiency and poor management level. The purpose of this paper is to build a complex network model and realize an information management system of talent training program for supporting the EEA process.

Based on polychromatic graph (PG), this paper builds a network model of talent training program for engineering specialty. The related information and data are organized and processed in this network model. From the bidirections of top-down and bottom-up, the user requirements are retrieved automatically in logic layer. Together with the specialty of mechanical engineering, the proposed PG-based network modeling method is applied and the corresponding information management system is realized.

The study results show that the PG-based network modeling method takes full advantages of the strong simulation ability of PG to model the complex network system and has some unique merits in formal expression of problem, efficient processing of information and lightweight realization of system. Further, the information management system of talent training program can reduce the tedious human labor and improve the management level of EEA process dramatically.

This paper proposes a PG-based network modeling method, in which the nodes and the edges can be painted by some unified colors to describe the different kinds of activities and the various types of interactions. Theoretically, this modeling method does not distinguish the activities, the interactions and their properties in graphic symbol and the problem size is diminished about a half. Furthermore, this paper provides an effective experience and idea to the education institutions for implementing the engineering education accreditation, increasing the education management efficiency and promoting the talent training quality.

On completion of analysis of this case, students would be able to: appreciate the context of a typical delisting decision of a public company that is part of a large business group; analyze the complex nature of the relationships among the promoter shareholders, minority shareholders, government-controlled financial institutions, independent directors and executive directors in such a situation of transfer of value; and develop the best possible course of action for the promoters, independent directors and public shareholders, keeping into consideration the principles of corporate governance and the objective of shareholders’ wealth maximization.

The case presents an opportunity to examine the corporate restructuring and governance issues associated with the delisting attempt of India-based mining company Vedanta Ltd., by its London-based parent company, Vedanta Resources. The case focuses on the conflict of interests between the promoters of a business group and the public shareholders of a subsidiary, and the pivotal roles independent directors and proxy advisory firms play in supporting the public shareholders.

The case can be discussed in a graduate-level corporate strategy course that deals with restructuring and governance issues in companies, especially large group companies. It can also be discussed in a course of corporate governance where students have the opportunity to understand the potential conflict between promoters and other shareholders, and the moderating roles the independent directors and institutions may play in resolving such conflicts.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy.