Vijay Dandapani
Vijay Dandapani
Since August 1993, Vijay Dandapani, the President and Chief Operating Officer of Apple Core Hotels, has been instrumental in the company's growth and development, including acquisitions, six hotel renovations and the implementation of state-of-the-art computer systems. A hotel industry veteran, Dandapani, is also a member of the Board of Directors for the following associations: Hotel Association of New York City, NYC & Company, NYSHTA (New York State Hospitality & Tourism Association), and the International Hotel Motel & Restaurant Show at Javits.
Social media – manna or mania for marketers?
While just about any company in any business has by now a social media presence if not a strategy the jury still seems to...
Brand labels: Nailing it by naming it
Name changes in business is a business by itself and a fairly large one at that. From individual celebrities like Swag who changes...
Pricing ancillary goods and services
United airlines, like some of its peers, appears to be continually on the lookout for new ways to get its customers to open their...
Innovation and new consumers
The explosion of apps across platforms and other innovations offers a cornucopia of buying and selling opportunities. At least that is the...
Brave new world of customer “service”
A Dresden, Germany based company, Cognitec which touts itself as the market leader for "face recognition technologies and applications for enterprise and government customers"...
Elderly consumers: a new take on the old
Marketing to those on the latter side of life's continuum is not a novel idea and, given their rising purchasing power in the developed...
Zoning in on employees’ meaning quotient
Optimizing workplace productivity is a process requiring continual reinvention given its dynamic nature. The McKinsey Quarterly, a thought publication put out by the leading...
Thriving on the vine: consumerism among ageing consumers
Late last year GMA (the Global Marketing Alliance) ran an article on an oft-mentioned and written topic: marketing to the ageing consumer. The author...
Mining the customer’s mind
The Harvard Business School's newsletter of several years ago had a piece on the "subconscious mind of the consumer". With the premise that "95%...
Spurring leadership with the allure of charisma
Charisma is a necessary if not sufficient ingredient for success in public life. When present it is often touted as the reason for...
Gamification: a catch all motivator?
The newest buzz word doing the rounds of both academia and management, gamification, not only sounds ungainly but seems also to have a quasi-unreal...
Voyeurism in loyalty programs
Phocuswright, the travel industry's leading research site in a recent article singles out a rapidly growing trend among travelers, particularly within the US: a...
The changing employee-customer engagement paradigm
An article in the Gallup Business Journal reflects on the "power of the employee-customer encounter" noting that the "moment when an employee connects emotionally...
Conflicting consumer traits: reconciling conformity with distinctiveness
The latest issue of the Journal of Consumer Behavior has an evocatively titled academic paper "If I want you to like me, should I...
Contextual marketing: a case of cognitive dissonance?
It is perhaps unsurprising that the world's leading coffee retailer (in terms of sales) features "bucks" in its name. For that is what they...
Service Excellence: Insights from a (very) low cost high value model
Technology more so than any other factor dominates headlines when it comes to issues affecting service quality; as in this article in the Financial...
Reviewing reviews
A recent issue of the Financial Times has a column suggesting that "online reviews tell us less than we think". The column's thrust...
(Im)mobile wallets?
Mobile wallets have been heralded for the past several years as a paradigmatic change in payment technology. While new technology that was to bring...
Better customer engagement via social media
Digital marketing intelligence website eMarketers reports that social media marketing software company Awareness came out with a study in July of this year that...
Tracking customers in real time
The website Financial Channel reports that a recent survey "released by Hampton Hotels uncovered that one in three Americans (33 percent) claims they are...