Role of Customer Retention Equity in Creating and Developing Brand Value

The present study attempts to explore and establish a customer retention equity scale and examines its impact on brand value in the Indian banking sector. The data were collected from 500 account holders of the five nationalized banks—State Bank of India, Punjab National Bank, Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India, Housing Development Finance Corporation, and Jammu and Kashmir Bank from Jammu City, North India—using a purposive sampling technique. Structural equation modeling was applied to test the study hypotheses. The study finds that customer retention strategies that include loyalty and affinity schemes, special treatment benefits, a customer feedback survey, a courtesy system, and content marketing significantly contribute to retention equity. Further, the study also reveals that retention equity has a positive and significant impact on brand value and its dimensions—brand loyalty, brand association, and brand awareness. The study contributes to the extant literature by developing and validating the customer retention equity scale from customer perspectives in the Indian banking sector. In addition, the study also integrates the research stream of retention equity with brand value to signify the contributory role of customer retention equity on brand value and its dimensions. Since the study is limited to assessing customer retention equity and brand value relationship, their relationship with other constructs, such as relational quality, customer equity, and customer loyalty, should be explored in further work.     

Delayed monsoon,irrigation and crop yields

Most of the empirical literature assessing the impacts of climate change on agriculture has modeled crop yields as a function of the levels or deviations in the growing-period rainfall. However, an aspect that has received little attention in the empirical literature relates to the relationship between the timing of monsoon rains and crop yields. Using a pan-India district-level panel dataset for 50 years, this article investigates two interrelated issues critical to understanding the impacts of weather-induced agricultural risks and their management. It first examines the impact of the timing of monsoon onset on crop yields and then assesses the role of irrigation in mitigating its effects. The article finds that the delayed onset of monsoon is detrimental to crops, and its effects are realized beyond the rainy season. The findings also demonstrate that irrigation helps mitigate the harmful effects of delayed monsoon. Finally, to link these findings to farm-level adjustments, the article shows that farmers explicitly adjust the timing of irrigation in response to delays in monsoon rains.