Sustainable development: A Malaysian perspective

Sustainable development is all the rage. Malaysian firms too have been quick to jump into the bandwagon, especially with regards to their corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. However, sustainable development has been increasingly interpreted from a strictly Western-centric value system.This may pose challenges to Malaysian firms as they adopt sustainable practices into their operations.Four key issues are presented and discussed, particularly in relation to Malaysian’s socioeconomic landscape.Following that, this paper calls for a return to the fundamentals of sustainable development, which is unfettered to value suppositions and instead focused on more pragmatic reasons.To that end, this paper proceeds to make recommendations of a more suitable approach in embracing sustainable development in Malaysia that would bring about a virtuous cycle of enrichment for the business sector as well as the society

Does Service Recovery Affect Customer Satisfaction? A Study on Co-Created Retail Industry

AbstractIn today's hyper-competitive business environment, customer satisfaction is vital for success. However, in many businesses, service failure may surface despite consistent avoidance efforts. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between service recovery and customer satisfaction in co-created retail industry. Co-created retail industry which reflects the engagement of customers in business value creation is a win-win approach to customers and retailers particularly in context of service recovery. Although predominant attention on service recovery has been assessed in hospitality context especially in hotel and restaurant setting, there are very limited explorations in co-created retail context to lend sufficient understanding for retail recovery management. A conceptual framework and three prepositions were developed indicating that customer satisfaction is influenced by three justice dimensions of service recovery which is outcome justice, procedural justice and interactional justice. Managerial implication of this study is discussed to exhibit the importance of service recovery in winning back the upset customers

Nation branding: resources, management, and performance

Nation Branding is imperative as nations compete in inviting inward investment, strengthening images, attracting talents, winning export markets, and garnering the trust of the population towards the ruling government. This study integrates the Resource-Based View (RBV) theory and Anholt’s hexagon model in order to examine the nation branding efforts in Kuwait from the perspectives of business communities. Quantitative analysis was performed to measure suitable variables for the Kuwait nation branding as a way of meeting the research objectives. The research is founded in the theoretical framework of the five main constructs namely Reputation Resources (investment, export, and tourism), Governance (power relation, region stability, and fair trade), Psychographic (attitude, cultural values, and behavior), Snowball sampling was carried out using the 210 usable data which were collected from businessmen from various cities of Kuwait. Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was utilized in analyzing the data. The results indicate a significant relationship between reputation resources and governance on branding performance with the mediation of the role of branding management. However, the psychographic aspects of the people which were hypothesized to influence the nation branding were found to be insignificant. The findings shed light on existing nation branding knowledge stock and provide valuable insights for the government in improving its Nation Branding Strategy

Recovering from service failure: does satisfaction fortify brand trust?

Most companies across the globe are aware the impact of service failure towards the reputation and long term profitability of their businesses. However, not all companies are fully prepared for such transgression.As a result of service failure, customers will be dissatisfied and lost trust towards the company’s brand.Therefore, a study on service recovery is critical to investigate its influence in building customer satisfaction and brand trust.Justice theory is one of the most prominent theoretical foundations in service recovery studies. Thus, the three dimensions of justice theory which includes distributive justice, procedural justice, and interactional justice will be employed in this study.It is expected that this conceptual paper will provide platform for practitioners and researchers who are interested to explore the importance of service recovery in retaining customers and increase profitability

The systematic review and conception of brand socialization, engagement and loyalty amongst private hospital patrons

Our study aim is to present the systematic review and conception of the potential research concerning brand socialization and brand engagement and how they find out about the brand loyalty among private hospital patrons. Currently, the health care industry in developing countries is playing a crucial role to cater for consumers’ needs and demands. The private health care industry in Malaysia is also of no exception—it is undeniably facing intense challenges in trying to deliver the best services to their patrons in the most effective and efficient manner. Of late, marketers, practitioners, and researchers are interested in analysing the key secret behind their engagement with their consumers. Moreover, it would be pointless for firms to spend a significant amount of time and money to build their brands with the patrons will be in vain if they fail to generate profits to stay for long in the industry. Thus, the interaction among consumers is boosted by brand socialization to build engagement which further affects the loyalty of the health care industry. However, as far as the conception process is concerned, researchers may have to deal with a lot of information about brand and branding from past literature which requires some systematic reviews that aim to identify, evaluate critically and assimilate the outcomes of connected and considerable studies so that more proper conception of the research framework can be obtained. The practical implications of this study will both enrich and benefit the researchers and marketers in the health care industry to increase the conceptions of appropriate branding constructs

Interest in Entrepreneurship : an exploratory study on engineering and technical students in entrepreneurship education and choosing entrepreneurship as a career

Entrepreneurship is often thought to be a likely subject for business discipline students but not for technical students. Enterprising elements of entrepreneurship such as evaluating opportunity, developing new products, and handling start-ups are part and parcel of most business management curriculum. As for technical discipline students interested in creating their own organization after graduation, they seem to be left in dark although in many cases they are originators of product ideas. In Malaysia, there is a growing concern that technical students do not have sufficient entrepreneurial skills to venture in business particularly running small and medium enterprise (SME) set-ups. There are comments that these students have narrow business perspectives, less flexible to branch in other working areas and foresee themselves as only job seekers and not job creators. This spells the need for universities to introduce entrepreneurship subjects to non-business disciplines. The research project will concentrate on the topic of entrepreneurship education, with specific emphasis on how this education can be promoted and fostered to technical students. To best help students prepare for these new challenges, this research sought to identify an appropriate set of undergraduate courses for introduction of entrepreneurship elements to technical students and to indicate the level of student interest in these courses. Final year technical students from several public higher learning institutions of Malaysia (IPTAs) were chosen as respondents for the survey. The result shows entrepreneurship education should be incorporated into the non-business disciplines. The implication of the results led to an import set of guidelines, which can be used by educators when designing programs to suit different needs and demands of the technical students

An Empirical Investigation of Marketing Promotion on Malaysian Muslim Millennials Intentions to Visit Halal Tourism Destination

Previously, the Indonesian government targeted a 16.4 % annual growth during 2014 - 2019. However, with only 10.4 % growth in 2015, undoubtedly it requires extra work to meet inbound tourist target. By 2016, inbound data shows Malaysia as the main contributor of Muslim visitor to Indonesia and Mastercard-HalalTrip 2017 report reveals Malaysia as one of the top 10 Muslim Millennial Outbound Markets from OIC countries. It makes Malaysia Muslim millennials as biggest opportunity for Indonesia tourism industry and Millennial traveler already displays as one of the fastest growing consumer segments globally. Hence, this study attempts to investigate behavioral intention of Malaysian Muslim millennials to visit Indonesia’s halal tourism destinantion. By adapting marketing promotion (MP) into TPB framework, attitude (ATT) play a role as mediating variable to assessed intention to visit (ITV). Through a quantitative research methodology, this study will collect questionnaires distributed among 294 Muslim millennials in Malaysia. Smart PLS version 3 software is used to analyze relationship prediction and hypotheses testing. The findings revealed that ATT have a mediation effect between MP and ITV. This indicates that Indonesian’s MP has a significant effect on the decision making of the Malaysian millennials to visit Indonesia as a Halal Tourism Destination. In other words, Indonesian’s MP has successfully convey the image and information of Indonesia as an attractive Halal Tourism Destination

Women participation in business:a focus on franchising venture

The number of women involved in business sector is a growing phenomenon worldwide.Despite this scenario, the involvement of women in business particularly in franchising business is not being studied thoroughly and systematically. Franchising is known as a mean to provide opportunities to minorities and women who have interests to venture in business. This study attempts to look into a few questions related to women involvement in franchising venture. The questions are: 1) what is the pattern of womens participation in franchise business 2) problems faced by franchisees in the franchise business and 3) what are the role of government in promoting and assisting the women in their franchise business. The study is conducted by taking samples of 24 women franchisors and 31 franchisees all over Malaysia participating in franchise business. The findings show that there are less women franchisors in the top administrative positions such as the managing director, chairman and the general manager. The top three problems identified by franchisees are limited control in managing the franchise business, the power to terminate the agreement by franchisees and tough competition facing them as franchisees. The government is really showing their commitment and doing their part in supporting the franchise business by giving loans and setting up agencies which seriously looked into the matters of franchising in Malaysia

A comparative study on service quality in the grocery retailing: evidence from Malaysia and Turkey

Comparing service quality in different countries and cultures has been a recent point of interest among researchers to enhance understanding on how customers of different environments react to elements of service quality. Earlier studies were focusing on comparison among western countries or between advance western and Asian regions. This study intends to compare customers' perceptions on service quality between Malaysia and Turkey, as both are emerging economies with strong growth in grocery retail industry. Therefore, the differences of Malaysian and Turkeys' priorities of service quality items will be explored, compared and analyzed for researchers. The study is participated by 357 customer surveys from Turkey and 249 from Malaysia on an approved Scale and scores were analyzed by the principal component factor analysis. The comparison will enhance the understanding on customers' priority in Malaysia and Turkey. This is the first comparison on service quality between emerging markets of Turkey and Malaysia on how customers react in South East region and Asia-Europe cross borders area principally to enrich the bilateral trading efforts and marketing understanding between the two nation

The impact of intercultural communication competence on service quality and customer satisfaction

This article aims to better understand the impact of intercultural communication competence (ICC) on personal interaction (PI) and customer satisfaction (CS) in grocery retailing. Measurement of the constructs and their interrelationships were examined based on structural equation modeling. Although numerous researchers have studied the topic of service quality (SQ) and CS, none of those studies has explored the critical role of ICC and integrated the construct into their SQ and CS models. Intercultural notions are acknowledged as key determinants to improve our understanding on this phenomenon and provide an impetus for further research