Ocean Container Carrier Selection Criteria and Their Perceived Importance in the Indian Environment : A Shipper-Only Study

The objective of this paper is to assist ocean container carriers in devising effective marketing strategies to attract and retain Indian shippers. It has been achieved by letting the container carriers understand the list of criteria Indian shippers use in their carrier selection decisions along with their perceived importance. To explore the criteria, review of transportation literature, customer satisfaction survey questionnaires and review of SERVQUAL battery, telephonic interviews and focus groups were conducted. To bring out the perceived importance, a questionnaire was used. A mean score analysis was carried out to analyze the importance of each criterion along with its overall rank. On analysis, it was found that the Indian shippers use forty eight criteria in their container carrier selection decisions and out of these, low freight is the first ranked criterion and pricing flexibility is the second ranked one. Gifts and compliments is the least important criterion in the list. All the 48 criteria have been classified only under three ratings, viz., somewhat important, important and extremely important and none of them have been rated neutral or less than that. It is a premier study of this kind undertaken in India and hence is expected to open up enormous scope for future research