Organisations continually seek new ways to acquire, retain and increase business, since the cost of losing customers is rising. Service organisations such as hotels need to put in place competitive marketing strategies to improve their competitiveness and thus retain customers. Once demand is created, a hotel needs to manage this demand as well as its capacity to deliver. This study investigates the importance that hotels attach to executing competitive marketing strategies, as well as managing supply and demand. The study also determines whether or not hotels of different size and ownership type differ in their view of the importance of carrying out these functions. An interviewer-administered in-office survey was used to collect data from hotel managers in Gauteng. Hotel managers across the board consider all competitive marketing strategies as important. Significant correlations exist, however, between the importance attached to certain competitive marketing strategies and the size of hotel – as well as the hotel ownership type. Key words: competitive marketing strategy, hotel, services marketing, competitive advantage, sustainable competitive advantage, positioning, service life

I am grateful to the senior executives of many Indian software companies who allowed me to interview them and shared their useful insights in developing this paper. Sustaining Economic Development: Contributions from and Challenges to India’s Software Industry The role of India’s information technology industry in India’s technology-based economic development even in the face of a global recession has caught the attention of policymakers, academics and industry experts. While future prospects for growth are unanimously reckoned to be high in every forum, one question is commonly posed: is this growth sustainable? Numerous studies conducted in the last few years point to a serious debate that India’s competitive advantages, especially the advantage stemming from India’s large technology workforce, may be eroding over time. While industry perceives challenges to growth lie in the shortage of human resources, policy makers in India contend that India is well prepared to meet future demand for the information technology workforce. My paper explores this dichotomy in industry perception and government policy response

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T he aim of this research is to develop, examine and validate a conceptual framework, which explains factors of the export supply chain relationship focusing on information sharing in export supply chain management field. This research seeks to understand the dyadic exporter-producer relationship in the export industry of fresh fruit and vegetables from Jordan to the European Union. Jordan supplies very limited fresh fruit and vegetable exports to the European market and the exporter-producer relationships are still weak, which impedes the emergence of a high performance supply chain within this promising market. There has been a lack of conceptual and empirical research on information sharing, which limits the understanding of the business relationship and there is no theoretical framework analysing export supply chain relationships. Therefore, this research examines the possible association between the following factors: relationship, network and transaction dimensions; information sharing; and export performance. A framework for the influence of information sharing