Sistema endocrino - EL CORTISOL - UNIVERSIDAD CATÓLICA DE CUENCA UNIDAD ACADÉMICA DE SALUD Y BI

2. EL CORTISOL

2.1. Sistema endocrino

At ABAD, they have several significant features that set us apart from the rest. Their homes are on par with the best homes around the world.

a) Location:- With the years experience in the area of building quality homes, ABAD has always ensured prime locations for its projects that are:

 Easily Accessible

 Close to All Facility

 Ideal for Peaceful Living

 A Clean and Green Environment

 On Land That Can Only Appreciate in Value

b) Range: - They are excited to be able to offer such a wide range such a wide range on home options, i.e., apartments, villas and commercial space, all at premier locations in Cochin.

They can truly deliver on the promise of having something for everyone at ABAD. They are giving a villa or an apartment, 2 bedrooms and 3 bedrooms, a view of the water front to a hillside locale, an exclusive location to a more centralized one; the chooses are endless, at prices to fit everyone‘s budget.

c) Opportunity for Investment: - Kerala has emerged as one of the favourite holiday destinations in the world. It goes without saying that a holiday home in ―Gods Own Country‖, coupled with spiralling real estate prices will definitely give you excellent returns on your investment.

d) Timely Completion: - When they make a promise of on time handing over of the project, they deem it a major commitment to complete every one of our projects on schedule.

e) Support: - ABAD work towards building of trust from the day of signing up with the company. ABAD initiate it by keeping the customers updated on the progress of the apartment with periodic reports and photographs. They also deliver after sale support for property care and management.

f) NRI Customers: - An amazing number of ABAD‘s clients are NRIs. This is largely due to the fact that the homes they provide are up to par with the international quality that NRIs are used to and of course, because of their host of services that cover, arranging housing loans to search for tenants.

g) Professionalism: - A great deal of work goes into each of homes, which are designed by the best architects and built by the finest craftsmen. They pay painstaking attention to every detail, and work to ensure that each project is completed on time. Pursue quality at all levels of execution of the projects. ABAD engage the finest architects and talented craftsmen to design and build the homes where happiness resides.

CHAPTER 3 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND

LITERATURE REVIEW

3.1 Theoretical Framework

A conceptual framework is used in research to outline possible courses of action or to present a preferred approach to an idea or thought. Conceptual frameworks (theoretical frameworks) are a type of intermediate theory that attempt to connect to all aspects of inquiry (e.g., problem definition, purpose, literature review, methodology, data collection and analysis). Conceptual frameworks can act like maps that give coherence to empirical inquiry. Because conceptual frameworks are potentially so close to empirical inquiry, they take different forms depending upon the research question or problem.

3.1.1 Marketing

Marketing, more than any other business function, deals with customers. Understanding, creating, communicating, and delivering customer value and satisfaction are at the very heart of modern marketing thinking and practice. Marketing is the delivery of customer satisfaction at a profit. The twofold goal of marketing is to attract new customers by promising superior value and to keep current customers by delivering satisfaction.

Today, marketing must be understood not in the old sense of making a sale—"telling and selling"—but in the new sense of satisfying customer needs. Selling occurs only after a product is produced. By contrast, marketing starts long before a company has a product. Marketing is the homework that managers undertake to assess needs, measure their extent and intensity, and determine whether a profitable opportunity exists. Marketing continues throughout the product's life, trying to find new customers and keep current customers by improving product appeal and performance, learning from product sales results, and managing repeat performance. If the marketer does a good job of understanding consumer needs, develops products that provide superior value and prices, distributes, and promotes them effectively, these products will sell very easily. Thus, selling and advertising are only part of a larger "marketing mix"—a set of marketing tools that work together to affect the marketplace.

Marketing is defined as a social and managerial process whereby individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating and exchanging products and value with others. To

explain this definition, the marketer should examine the following important terms: needs, wants, and demands; products and services; value, satisfaction, and quality; exchange, transactions, and relationships; and markets. The figure shows that these core marketing concepts are linked, with each concept building on the one before it.

Chart: - 3.1

Source: - http://gmx.xmu.edu.cn/ews/business/pmarketing/chapter01.htm#what

Marketing means managing markets to bring about exchanges and relationships for the purpose of creating value and satisfying needs and wants. Thus, marketing as a process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want by creating and exchanging products and value with others. Exchange processes involve work. Sellers must search for buyers, identify their needs, design good products and services, set prices for them, promote them, and store and deliver them. Activities such as product development, research, communication, distribution, pricing, and service are core marketing activities. Even though marketing as being carried on by sellers, buyers also carry on marketing activities. Consumers do marketing when they search for the goods they need at prices they can afford. Company purchasing agents do marketing when they track down sellers and bargain for good terms.

In the usual situation, marketing involves serving a market of end users in the face of competitors. The company and the competitors send their respective products and messages to consumers either directly or through marketing intermediaries to the end users. All of the actors in the system are affected by major environmental forces (demographic, economic, physical, technological, political–legal, social–cultural).

Chart: - 3.2

Main actors and forces in a modern marketing system

Source: http://gmx.xmu.edu.cn/ews/business/pmarketing/chapter01.htm#what

Each party in the system adds value for the next level. Thus, a company's success depends not only on its own actions but also on how well the entire system serves the needs of final consumers. Wal-Mart cannot fulfill its promise of low prices unless its suppliers provide merchandise at low costs. Ford cannot deliver high quality to car buyers unless its dealers provide outstanding service. Marketing of the products and services can be stressed by branding it, where branding of the products enables the customers to create an image of the brand in their mind.

3.1.2 Branding

Brand is the personality or identity of an organization, product, or family of products, derived from a customer perception of rational and emotional attributes. Businesses use branding to drive customer preference for their products and services, to sustain higher prices, to reduce the cost of (and need for) selling, to boost the return on demand generation activities, to assist word of mouth, and to improve customer retention and repeat business. Depending on the chosen brand architecture, a brand can either apply to a company (such as Apple), as an umbrella brand across several businesses (for example, the Virgin brand), or to individual lines of business within a

Branding helps the product or service to make a favourable impact on the target customer while the branding concepts help in outlining the guidelines that should be followed during the branding process. Branding of any product and service should follow some constants that help in establishing a brand in the long run. Branding of the products and services paves way for making high quality perception about the brand in the minds of the customers.

3.1.3 Service Quality

"Quality" in a service organization is a measure of the extent to which the service delivered meets the customer's expectations. The nature of most services is such that the customer is present in the delivery process. This means that the perception of quality is influenced not only by the "service outcome" but also by the "service process". The "perceived quality" lies along a continuum. "Unacceptable quality" lies at one end of this continuum, while "ideal quality" lies at the other end. The points in-between represent different gradations of quality. Measures of service quality may either be hard or soft. Hard measures are those which are quantifiable or objective; for example, computer downtime or the proportion of telephone calls answered. Soft measures are those which are qualitative, judgmental, and subjective and based on perceptual

data, for example, customer‘s satisfaction with speed of service or manager‘s assessment of staff attitude towards customers. Soft measures of service quality are particularly relevant to the measurement of the quality of intangible aspects of service.

Information on service quality can be gathered from internal and/ or external data sources.

Internal data are those generated by the staff or management inside an organization, enabling the organization to ensure that it is meeting its own internal specification of service quality.

Customers also inevitably assess the quality of the service during and after its provision. Their assessments (external measures of service quality) result in a level of customer satisfaction. Thus service organizations may measure service quality not only on the basis of their own internal data but also by using external data, by monitoring customer satisfaction. Service quality as perceived by customers, can be defined as ‗the extent of discrepancy between customers‘

expectations or desires and their perceptions‘ (Zeithaml, Parasuraman and Berry,1990).

SERVQUAL is a questionnaire designed to measure the gap between the expectations and perceptions of a customer from a particular service. This questionnaire has five categories:

Tangibles, Reliability, Responsiveness, Assurance and Empathy. The quality of the service is perceived in the minds of the customers, as products having high brand value have greater quality and vice versa.

3.1.4 Perception

In philosophy, psychology and cognitive science, perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of sensory information. The processes of perception routinely alter what humans see. When people view something with a preconceived concept about it, they tend to take those concepts and see them whether or not they are there. This problem stems from the fact that humans are unable to understand new information, without the inherent bias of their previous knowledge. A person‘s knowledge creates his or her reality as much as the truth, because the human mind can only contemplate that to which it has been exposed. When objects are viewed without understanding, the mind will try to reach for something that it already recognizes, in order to process what it is viewing. That which most closely relates to the unfamiliar past experiences, makes up what they see when they

look at things that they do not comprehend. Sensation usually refers to the immediate, relatively unprocessed result of stimulation of sensory receptors in the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, or skin.

Perception, on the other hand, better describes one's ultimate experience of the world and typically involves further processing of sensory input. In practice, sensation and perception are virtually impossible to separate, because they are part of one continuous process. Thus, perception in humans describes the process whereby sensory stimulation is translated into organized experience. That experience, or percept, is the joint product of the stimulation and of the process itself. Relations found between various types of stimulation (e.g., light waves and sound waves) and their associated percept suggest inferences that can be made about the properties of the perceptual process; theories of perceiving then can be developed on the basis of these inferences. Because the perceptual process is not itself public or directly observable (except to the perceiver himself, whose percept are given directly in experience), the validity of perceptual theories can be checked only indirectly.

The products and services that an industrial company has to offer are generally organized around its customers‘ needs in addition to the level of expertise and production capabilities of the firm.

Creating a strategy for product development is an important and often multifaceted segment of running a successful enterprise, and it brings together a range of different principles, such as research and development, marketing, engineering, design, materials, and manufacturing. In most cases, an industrial product development strategy will depend on two main goals: keeping the new product or product line within the company‘s overall objectives and marketing philosophy, and developing a system for assessing the performance of an existing product. For evaluating the success of an existing product, factors such as sales, customer response, profits, competition, and market acceptance are usually involved. Consumers can evaluate a product along several levels. Its basic characteristics are inherent to the generic version of the product and are defined as the fundamental advantages it can offer to a customer. Generic products can be made distinct by adding value through extra features, such as quality or performance enhancements. The final level of consumer perception involves augmented properties, which offer less tangible benefits, such as customer assistance, maintenance services, training, or appealing payment options. In terms of competition with other products and companies, consumers greatly value these added benefits when making a purchasing decision, making it important for manufacturers to understand the notion of a ―total package‖ when marketing to

their customers. Higher brand perception leads the customer to create a behavior to the brand which may turn to the consumer buying behavior.

3.1.5 Consumer Behaviour

Consumer behaviour involves the psychological processes that consumers go through in recognizing needs, finding ways to solve these needs, making purchase decisions (e.g., whether or not to purchase a product and, if so, which brand and where), interpret information, make plans, and implement these plans (e.g., by engaging in comparison shopping or actually purchasing a product).The consumer faces numerous sources of influence as follows.

Chart: - 3.3

Source: - http://www.consumerpsychologist.com/intro_Consumer_Behavior.html

Often, cultural influences for granted, but they are significant. An American will usually not bargain with a store owner. This, however, is a common practice in much of the World. Physical factors also influence the behaviour. A person‘s self-image will also tend to influence what he or she will buy—an upwardly mobile manager may buy a flashy car to project an image of success. Social factors also influence what the consumers buy—often, consumers

seek to imitate others whom they admire, and may buy the same brands. The social environment can include both the mainstream culture and a subculture. Thus, sneaker manufacturers are eager to have their products worn by admired athletes. Finally, consumer behaviour is influenced by learning. To understand consumer buyer behaviour is to understand how the person interacts with the marketing mix. As described by Cohen the marketing mix inputs (or the four P's of price, place, promotion, and product) are adapted and focused upon the consumer. The psychology of each individual considers the product or service on offer in relation to their own culture, attitude, previous learning, and personal perception. The consumer then decides whether or not to purchase, where to purchase, the brand that he or she prefers, and other choices.

3.1.6 Consumer Buying Behaviour

Consumer Buying Behaviour refers to the buying behaviour of the ultimate consumer. A firm needs to analyze buying behaviour for:

 Buyer‘s reactions to a firms marketing strategy has a great impact on the firm‘s success.

 The marketing concept stresses that a firm should create a Marketing Mix (MM) that satisfies (gives utility to) customers, therefore need to analyze the what, where, when and how consumers buy.

 Marketers can better predict how consumers will respond to marketing strategies.

There are six Stages to the Consumer Buying Decision Process (For complex decisions). Actual purchasing is only one stage of the process. Not all decision processes lead to a purchase. All consumer decisions do not always include all 6 stages, determined by the degree of complexity.

The 6 stages are in the decision making process;

1. Problem Recognition (awareness of need) is the difference between the desired state and the actual condition. Deficit in assortment of products. Hunger--Food. Hunger stimulates to eat.

2. Information search is an internal search, memory or an External search if need more information. Friends and relatives (word of mouth). Marketer dominated sources; comparison shopping; public sources etc. A successful information search leaves a buyer with possible alternatives, the evoked set.

3. Evaluation of Alternatives is done when there is a need to establish criteria for evaluation, features the buyer wants or does not want. Rank/weight alternatives or resume search. If not satisfied with the choice then returns to the search phase.

4. Purchase decision is the process of choosing the buying alternative, includes product, package, store, method of purchase etc.

5. Purchase may differ from decision; it is the time lapse between 4 & 5, product availability.

6. Post-Purchase Evaluation is the evaluation of the outcome: Satisfaction or Dissatisfaction.

Cognitive Dissonance can be reduced by warranties, after sales communication etc.

Chart: - 3.4

Source: - http://www.consumerpsychologist.com/intro_Consumer_Behavior.html

Types of consumer buying behaviour are determined by the level of involvement in purchase decision, the importance and intensity of interest in a product in a particular situation. Buyer‘s level of involvement determines why he/she is motivated to seek information about a certain products and brands but virtually ignores others. High involvement purchases are the high priced goods, products visible to others, and the higher the risk is the higher the involvement. Types of risk assigned with high involvement purchase are

 Personal risk

 Social risk and

 Economic risk

53 The four type of consumer buying behaviour are:

 Routine Response/Programmed Behaviour--buying low involvement frequently purchased low cost items; need very little search and decision effort; purchased almost automatically.

Examples include soft drinks, snack foods, milk etc.

 Limited Decision Making--buying product occasionally. When need to obtain information about unfamiliar brand in a familiar product category, perhaps. Requires a moderate amount of time for information gathering. Examples include Clothes--know product class but not the brand.

 Extensive Decision Making/Complex high involvement, unfamiliar, expensive and/or infrequently bought products. High degree of economic/performance/psychological risk.

Examples include cars, homes, computers, education. Spend a lot of time seeking information and deciding through the gathered information from the company‘s Marketing Mix, friends and relatives, store personnel etc. Then the customer will go through all six stages of the buying process.

 Impulse buying, no conscious planning.

The purchase of the same product does not always elicit the same Buying Behaviour. Product can shift from one category to the next. For example: Going out for dinner for one person may be extensive decision making (for someone that does not go out often at all), but limited decision making for someone else. The reason for the dinner, whether it is an anniversary celebration, or a meal with a couple of friends will also determine the extent of the decision making.

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