Rural consumers' adoption of CRM in a developing country context

This paper illustrates how understanding consumer preferences through market research may enhance CRM adoption among the rural customers of a developing country like Bangladesh. It presents the case of Community Information Centre (CIC) established by Grameenphone, a company owned by Telenor, the Norwegian telecommunications company and Grameen Bank, the Nobel prize winning micro credit organisation in the rural settings of Bangladesh. The paper shows that CIC is an innovative way of building and maintaining customer relationships and technological interface with the financially constrained consumers in a poor developing economy like Bangladesh

Consumer Adoption of Pro-Poor Innovations in the Bottom of the Pyramid

In the context of the developing world the marginalised and poor have gained new significance and are a focus for marketers owing to C.K. Prahalad’s (2005) seminal work on the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) market. To lessen and improve the lives of the poor, pro-poor innovations are necessary for this market. However, when pro-poor innovations are developed for the BOP market, it is important to understand that the BOP exhibits different characteristics from the middle and high income consumer market because of different constraints faced by BOP consumers in their day to day life. Pro-poor innovations must, therefore, be developed that are tailored for this market and its unique surroundings (e.g., economic constraints, unreliable electricity etc.), to overcome these constraints. There are examples in the BOP market, where very useful pro-poor innovations (e.g., pure drinking water) with clear social benefits were unsuccessful in this market. Therefore, it is important to understand the complex array of antecedents to pro-poor innovation adoption in the BOP context so that practitioners and policy makers can maximise their chances of success in this large and socially important market. To understand the antecedents of innovation adoption, a range of theoretical models were developed (e.g., Value based Adoption Model, Consumer Acceptance of Technology model) but these have typically been validated within western, developed contexts. However, there is little research, which has investigated pro-poor innovation adoption in the BOP context. This research seeks to understand consumers’ pro-poor innovation adoption in the BOP context through: 1) empirically comparing seven innovation adoption models, 2) conceptually and empirically formulating an integrated pro-poor innovation adoption model, and 3) validating the newly developed model for the BOP. This research investigated these three objectives by conducting two studies. Study 1 was carried out to empirically compare the validity of seven consumer based innovation adoption models in the BOP. Following the procedure of Venkatesh et al. (2003), the empirical results of this comparison were coupled with theory in the area to conceptualise and develop a new model of innovation adoption for the BOP, coined here as the Integrated Theory of Pro-poor Innovation Adoption (ITPIA). Later, Study 2 was conducted to validate the newly developed ITPIA model in the BOP market. Consequently, this research contributes significantly to our understanding of the antecedents to consumer innovation adoption in this market through integrating elements of seven well-established consumer based innovation adoption models. The ITPIA model explains innovation adoption better than these existing seven models, which were mainly developed to explain innovation adoption by wealthier consumers in western contexts. This thesis also contributes by taking account of consumer heterogeneity such as urban and rural BOP area and different age groups. Although it may be common to assume that the BOP market want cheap products to suit their needs, the ITPIA model developed here shows that successful pro-poor innovations should address more than the lack of money of the BOP segment. It appears from this research that BOP consumers are not just rationally motivated. This research contributes by showing that BOP consumers don’t just look for functional, utilitarian benefits but are more likely to adopt a new product if it provides some degree of affective and hedonic gratifications. Interestingly, whereas consumer innovation adoption related research (Venkatesh et al., 2012) in developed country contexts suggests that intention is the strongest predictor of usage behaviour, this research contributes by providing the fact that supporting environment, which reduces external and internal constraints related to adoption of pro-poor innovations, is the strongest determinant of intention and usage behaviour of BOP consumers. Therefore, this research provides valuable theoretical and practical guidance about key antecedents, which influence the consumer adoption of pro-poor innovations in the BOP context, and this is of relevance to academics and policy makers with an interest in these markets

Rural consumers’ adoption of CRM in a developing country context

This paper illustrates how understanding consumer preferences through market research may enhance CRM adoption among the rural customers of a developing country like Bangladesh. It presents the case of Community Information Centre (CIC) established by Grameenphone, a company owned by Telenor, the Norwegian telecommunications company and Grameen Bank, the Nobel prize winning micro credit organisation in the rural settings of Bangladesh. The paper shows that CIC is an innovative way of building and maintaining customer relationships and technological interface with the financially constrained consumers in a poor developing economy like Bangladesh

Excessive use of online video streaming services: Impact of recommender system use, psychological factors, and motives

With the growing relevance of the Internet as a tool for communication and entertainment, researchers have examined the effects of individual's psychological factors and media use motives on their excessive use of Internet. Since Internet use has significant nuances, the excessive use of particular Internet application, such as social network services and online games, has been studied separately. However, as the major Internet application, online video streaming service has not been investigated. Moreover, other than psychological factors and media use motives, the IT features implemented in the application, such as the recommender system, could also induce excessive use behavior. This paper aims to examine individual's excessive use of online video streaming services and the effects of recommender system in such services. A survey of 490 video streaming service users was conducted. The results show that the use of recommendations, along with lack of self-control, lack of self-esteem and use motive of information seeking, lead to excessive usage of video streaming services. This study contributes to the literature of excessive Internet use by exploring individual's excessive use behavior in video streaming services and incorporating the salient role of recommender system in Internet applications

Visual cues and innovation adoption among bottom of the pyramid consumers

Purpose – To explore how visual comprehensibility of a product can affect innovation adoption among bottom of the pyramid consumers (BOP) in Bangladesh. Design/methodology/approach – This is an exploratory qualitative study based on interviews with 8 managerial respondents involved in the design and marketing of innovative products targeted at BOP consumers in Bangladesh, and 3 respondents who are consumers of these products. Findings – One key finding from this research, in comparison to innovation adoption research in developed contexts, is the distinct importance that BOP consumers attach to visual cues in learning about and understanding a new product. Practical implications – This research provides guidance for private and public sector organisations selling products and services to BOP consumers on the role of visual cues in generating better product comprehension. It also identifies the role of social relations in facilitating adoption of new products within this segment. Social implications – Through enhancing adoption of so called pro-poor innovations this research can assist in bringing about positive social change and developmental benefits in this burgeoning segment of the market. Originality/value – This is one of the first studies to consider innovation adoption of pro-poor innovations in BOP markets and one of the first studies to collect data on the role of visual comprehensibility for consumers in BOP markets

bbOCR: An Open-source Multi-domain OCR Pipeline for Bengali Documents

Despite the existence of numerous Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools, the lack of comprehensive open-source systems hampers the progress of document digitization in various low-resource languages, including Bengali. Low-resource languages, especially those with an alphasyllabary writing system, suffer from the lack of large-scale datasets for various document OCR components such as word-level OCR, document layout extraction, and distortion correction; which are available as individual modules in high-resource languages. In this paper, we introduce Bengali$.$AI-BRACU-OCR (bbOCR): an open-source scalable document OCR system that can reconstruct Bengali documents into a structured searchable digitized format that leverages a novel Bengali text recognition model and two novel synthetic datasets. We present extensive component-level and system-level evaluation: both use a novel diversified evaluation dataset and comprehensive evaluation metrics. Our extensive evaluation suggests that our proposed solution is preferable over the current state-of-the-art Bengali OCR systems. The source codes and datasets are available here: https://bengaliai.github.io/bbocr

An Empirical Comparison of Consumer Innovation Adoption Models: Implications for Subsistence Marketplaces

So called “pro-poor” innovations may improve consumer wellbeing in subsistence marketplaces. However, there is little research that integrates the area with the vast literature on innovation adoption. Using a questionnaire where respondents were asked to provide their evaluations about a mobile banking innovation, this research fills this gap by providing empirical evidence of the applicability of existing innovation adoption models in subsistence marketplaces. The study was conducted in Bangladesh among a geographically dispersed sample. The data collected allowed an empirical comparison of models in a subsistence context. The research reveals the most useful models in this context to be the Value Based Adoption Model and the Consumer Acceptance of Technology model. In light of these findings and further examination of the model comparison results the research also shows that consumers in subsistence marketplaces are not just motivated by functionality and economic needs. If organizations cannot enhance the hedonic attributes of a pro-poor innovation, and reduce the internal/external constraints related to adoption of that pro-poor innovation, then adoption intention by consumers will be lower

Communication of dividend decisions and banks' share price volatility

The objective of the study is to identify the decision effect of dividends on share price volatility. Seven banks listed with London Stock Exchange (LSE) are examined for the time period of five years (2006-2010). These data are analysed using different statistical test such as regression analysis and correlation matrix with the use of SPSS. The control variables in the study were price volatility, dividend yield, dividend payout, size, return on assets, assets growth and debt. The findings of the study indicate that dividend decisions and its communication affect the volatility of share price of the sample banks chosen. It also indicates that dividend yield and dividend payment have negative relationship with the volatility of share price. However, this relationship being insignificant, other issues like financial crisis might also affect the share price volatility during the time period chosen for the study. The study also finds that size has a negative relationship with the volatility of share price