An organization must manage its resource consumption and material flows in order to satisfy the demand of its products as efficiently as possible. Managing of the aforementioned requires a balance between the organizations resources (such as the capability of distribution and production) and the market demand. According to Gardner (1990), an estimation of future demand is a necessity for maintaining the balance. An instrument that is used frequently to estimate future demand is demand forecasting. The demand forecasting practice has been thoroughly studied and a plethora of academic contributions exist on the topic.

Background: The recent years in the Swedish Fast Moving Consumer Goods industry have been characterized by a palpable shift in power balance, favouring the retailers. Since the shift in power balance has strengthened the negotiation position of the retailers, the suppliers now have to, to a greater extent than before, accommodate to the retailers? goals, whether they be financial or strategic. Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate how this recent power shift has affected the relationships of suppliers and retailers. This development has resulted in the rather new and unexplored area of retailer value, which this study further aimed to explore.

During the latest 50 years, the Swedish porcelain tableware industry has gone from being rather successful to experience significant problems. Our empirical study attributes these problems to underlying changes in consumer buying behaviour, whereas current generation theory supports our findings. The younger generation has significantly different preferences compared to older generations, with less focus on quality and more focus on variability, and there is reason to believe that these findings also are applicable to other consumer purchases. The successful porcelain companies of tomorrow will be the ones that continuously can adapt to these and further changes in consumer buying behaviour..

The use of digital devices are widely spread among us. Children have an iPad in their hands before they learn how to talk and we bet you look at your smartphone more times a day then you would like to admit? Interaction through these devices have become so natural in our daily life that we get confused when a retailer does not offer a website or an app. The habit of searching for information in the most accessible channel and buying in the one that offers the benefit of convenience, and of course, saves you money and time, is a common way of shopping these days. This is referred to as multi-channel shopping.

Packaging has had little impact in marketing literature. Research has focused on a single transaction approach. Lately researchers are looking at packages as a tool for brand building purposes. Thus, the focus is moving towards a multiple transaction approach, where packages can affect the consumer also after the purchase. For a range of goods extrinsic cues has been shown to have stronger effect on consumers' evaluation than intrinsic ones.

Inom logistiken finns det ett antal frågeställningar, där struktur är ett viktigt område. Strukturfrågorna berör bland annat distributionen, exempelvis om en färdig produkt ska lagras eller skickas direkt till kund samt hur själva transporten ska gå till. Distributionsstrukturen syftar till att överbrygga de gap som uppstår mellan producerande företag och konsumenterna av deras produkter. Distributionen är i vissa fall mer komplex än företaget i sig, där beslutsfattandet kan handla om vilka delar som ska outsourcas och vilka externa aktörer som ska samarbetas med. Val gällande distributionen kan vara avgörande för ett företags lönsamhet och konkurrensförmåga.

A purchase decision can be seen as a multifaceted context that raises many unanswered questions. Understanding the consumer's evaluation of alternatives is complex and should be studied at a deeper rather than wider scale. There is a problem for retailers to understand how the consumer manages a purchase decision in a retail setting with durables goods that generates a higher effort. The aim is to describe the decision rules used by the consumer and how they are expressed in this context. A better understanding of which ones they use and how they are conveyed will help retailers to create effective marketing solutions that generate positive outcomes as increased profitability and customer satisfaction.

The modern beauty market is concentrated with intense competition where cosmetic brands fight to stay on top. A popular method in order to gain sales and increase margins is to influence existing customers to buy more with the use of suggestive selling. The purpose of this paper, was to further examine the different effects of suggestive selling with the use of complementary versus non- complementary goods in the form of customer satisfaction, customer view of the service encounter, as well as success in sales. In addition, the influence of the customer's purchase amount on the tendency to buy an extra product in a suggestive selling situation was examined. The study was conducted through the use of a field experiment with the support of surveys in 'The Body Shop'.

The purpose of this study was to examine two relatively similar product industries, of which one is successful in its commercialization and the other one is not successful. The two industries observed in this paper are both Swedish industries, and both of them produce slow moving consumer goods for the luxury consumer. The successful industry is represented by the Swedish fashion industry, more precisely The Swedish Fashion Wonder (TSFW) - a term describing the success of a specific coalition of fashion designers from Sweden. The unsuccessful industry is represented by the luxury watch industry in Sweden (LWIS). The method used to examine the two industries' inequalities is based on a qualitative study, consisting of in-depth interviews with industry expertise from both of the industries.

Corporate Social ResponsibilityThis thesis intends to exam the strategic use of Corporate Social Responsibility within fifthteen different companies, classified/divided into three various industries. The aim is to compare the three different industries, to look for disparities and similarities in their use of CSR. The disseration looks into both variance and resemblance in the use of Corporate Social Responsibility between the companies within the same branch of trade and between the industries.The industries of intrestThe three industries that the study has focus on is consumer, manufacturing and service related industries. Where the consumer industry is classified as companies with direct sales towards private consumers, the physical citizen. The manufacturing industry is classified as companies that manufacture products but that does´nt sell their products directly to the regular consumer.

The purpose of this study is to examine the change in consumer behaviour regarding the intention towards buying fruit when the layout of the fruit section has been altered. We want to increase the probability of making impulse purchases by altering the layout. In our study we have combined structured quantitative observations with structured quantitative as well as qualitative interviews, with secondary data in the form of sales data from two selected ICA-stores. We chose to use this triangulated approach in order to cross-examine our findings and overcome the limitations of one method by the use of another. Further, the Latin square design was used for the observations as a means to acknowledge the calendar effect during the experiment.

Consumer involvement in the product development process, co-creation, is being practiced by numerous companies. Previous research has investigated how consumer participation in co-creation affects consumer attitude. However, little is known about how co-creation affects the attitudes of the observervers of co-creation. The effect of observed co-creation on consumer attitude should be important when deciding whether to apply co-creation or not, as the observing consumers make up a larger part of the consumer collective than the participating consumers do. The paper at hand aims to investigate how observed co-creation affects consumer attitude and purchase intentions.

Risk analysis in connection with transportation of dangerous goods is associated with great uncertainty. In addition there are a number of specific problems that the risk analyst faces when risks associated with transportation of dangerous goods are to be analysed. In this report those problems and uncertainties are described.One of the most important conclusions in this report is that uncertainty analysis within risk analysis in connection to transportation of dangerous goods has to be made more effective..

Today a lot of goods is transported on wood pallets because it?s practical and enabels a fast way to load cargo. The drawbacks with pallets are that they weight a lot, are big and are relatively expensive. Therefore IKEA has developed plastic lists that can replace the europallet in some applications. In this examwork an automatic handling equipment for plastic lists are design from a requirement specification to a finished machine.

Voluntary organisations provided the first consumer guidance in Sweden. The government'sinterest in the question started during the second world war and has ever since increased.Since the 1970's the local authorities, with support from the community, have played animportant roll in consumer policy work. Due to the economic recession of recent years theappropriation to consumer guidance work has been cut down. The work has been rationalisedand libraries have more frequently been used to spread consumer information.In Stockholm the municipal has been responsible for local consumer information since the1940's. Co-operation with the library of Stockholm has occurred in different forms.