Airport performance is highly depended on effective retail management and management of airport concession. This thesis is tend to find the answer for two research questions developed, with a purpose to offer optimization of the dependency in a most convenient way:   What are the factors influencing successful retail operations in airports? and How to increase profit maximization and customers satisfaction through effective concession management?   The purpose of these research questions is to discover what is retail management in airport business sector. How airport operations management planning, implementing and evaluating their strategic decisions to generate revenues. More specifically, the purpose is focused on customers satisfaction and profit maximization approaches discovering airports. What is a correlation between attributes affecting airport revenue generation and operations management approaches, applied in different cases, when building relations with concessionaires. After conducting the survey with thirty international airports around the world, the importance of each attribute creating direct impact on customer satisfaction was measured and evaluated. The correlation between airport concession management types and the profit maximization was also identified and discussed. The research also became a starting point to investigate more factors influencing retail operations in airports.

The online market has developed into an equally strong competitor to the offline market. This study examines the market efficiency of the U.S. online and offline market based on the price level, price dispersion, price elasticity and menu cost. A direct comparison of all four market efficiency criteria based on empirical results is not discussed in the literature. Here, the empirical study analyzes and compares the online and offline prices of electronic products between the two largest retailers, Amazon and Walmart. The results clearly indicate that the online market is more efficient than the offline market. Comparing the online prices between the multichannel retailer Walmart and the pure online retailer Amazon we find that for 64.5% of the electronic products, Amazon has the better offer. While 26% of the prices are identical and only 9.5% of the overall prices offered by Walmart are lower. The price advantage of Amazon is explained by the strong price linkage between the online shop and the less efficient offline shop within the retailer Walmart. In 73% of the examined prices, the online and offline prices at Walmart are identical. Furthermore, this price linkage causes a high price dispersion of 14.7% between the online shops of the two retailers. As soon as Walmart breaks the price linkage through sales offers in their online shop, the price dispersion between the two retailers drops to 10.2%.

The focus of this thesis is on the internal and external environments of retail stores, and their contribution to retail branding from marketing and design perspectives. The retail industry in the postwar period and in particular since the 1980s has grown rapidly creating new store formats, new locations and new markets; retail brands have become some of the most powerful in the UK. The retail store now forms a visually engaging, three dimensional material and symbolic environment, where the brand merges with detailed store design. Both marketing and design initiatives have had a significant role in these developments, and consequently informed the distinctive interdisciplinary approach to the research journey. The body of work draws on nine publications, from an initial exploratory paper in 2003 to the final piece of work in 2010. The journey is characterized by its critical engagement with qualitative methodology, and an increasing awareness of the value of visual methods in the field. This contributed to a different understanding of the internal spaces of the store from a consumer perspective and the co-creative possibilities of retail design. As the research journey progressed, the contribution of the store to the retail brand was extended to its place in the external, urban environment. This contributed to understanding the significance of the building to the retail brand, through prestigious new buildings but also the re-use and regeneration of commercial buildings and their meaningful connections with the past. It is in this context that the body of work contributes new knowledge of the relationship between design, branding and experience in retail environments in which the design of the building, both internally and in its local context provide new opportunities to communicate to, and create experiences with consumers.

Este estudo objetivou a compreensão dos fatores que conduzem a um melhor desempenho de franquias, considerada a ótica da satisfação dos consumidores. O capítulo 1 abordou o referencial teórico mais amplo da economia e da administração de varejo. O capítulo 2 apresentou uma revisão das principais discussões teóricas sobre franquias. O capítulo 3 apresenta a metodologia geral de desenvolvimento da pesquisa. O capitulo 4 análise e discute os principais resultados obtidos. / This study try to explain the main aspects that justify the franchising business by the consumer satisfaction analysis Chapter 1 treaths the main aspects conceming about the economics ande the retail management Chapter 2 study the main discussions about franchising Chapter 3 presents the metodology applied in this study Chapter 4 presents the main conclusions and observations

To survive and thrive in the customer-oriented global market, retail companies have to make persistent efforts to provide customers with satisfactory shopping experience enriched by leisure process, interaction for merchandise information and personalised assistance. In traditional retail stores, customers’ needs cannot be fully satisfied due to difficulties in locating target products, out-of-stocks, a lack of professional assistance for product selection, and long waiting for payments. The relative visibility and traceability of individual items provided by the radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is helpful for enhancement of customer shopping experience (CSE). However, current RFID applications for retail business tend to be limited to inventory control and replenishment, with few implementations for CSE enhancement based on collection and analysis of real-time RFID data. To mitigate these limitations, this research project develops RFID applications for real-time collection and analysis of customer shopping behaviour (CSB) data in retail stores. Artificial intelligence (AI) is incorporated for data analysis to facilitate business decision-making and proactive individual marketing. Accordingly, an item-level RFID-based customer shopping experience enhancement (IRCSEE) system is developed to provide customers with leisure shopping process, interaction for merchandise information and personalised guidance for enhancement of CSE in apparel retail stores. The IRCSEE system incorporates RFID hardware devices installed in an apparel retail store to interrogate RFID-tagged apparel items to obtain data for subsequent sales processing and analysis. It is characterised with a programmable data format for unique identification of individual apparel items, together with a suite of software modules to control the RFID hardware devices at different locations of the apparel retail store for real-time collection of product information and CSB data. Moreover, an innovative fuzzy screening (FS) algorithm of AI techniques is developed to analyse the RFID-collected CSB data and the corresponding product information for generation of apparel collocation recommendations to provide customers with intelligent and personalised assistances in product selection. The algorithm considers not only the static fashion expertise, but also the dynamic customer preferences for collocation, such that the recommendations are more effective and adaptive for enhancement of CSE in the fast-changing apparel retail industry. The IRCSEE system is validated in an emulated RFID-based apparel retail store. Experimental results demonstrate that with appropriate RFID hardware settings, the proposed system is effective to help enhance CSE in apparel retail stores by providing customers with leisure shopping process, interaction for merchandise information and personalised apparel collocations. Furthermore, the approaches for collecting real-time CSB by RFID technology and analysing such data by AI techniques can be conveniently adapted for many other products to improve retail business management in general. / published_or_final_version / Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering / Master / Master of Philosophy

Este estudo objetivou a compreensão dos fatores que conduzem a um melhor desempenho de franquias, considerada a ótica da satisfação dos consumidores. O capítulo 1 abordou o referencial teórico mais amplo da economia e da administração de varejo. O capítulo 2 apresentou uma revisão das principais discussões teóricas sobre franquias. O capítulo 3 apresenta a metodologia geral de desenvolvimento da pesquisa. O capitulo 4 análise e discute os principais resultados obtidos. / This study try to explain the main aspects that justify the franchising business by the consumer satisfaction analysis Chapter 1 treaths the main aspects conceming about the economics ande the retail management Chapter 2 study the main discussions about franchising Chapter 3 presents the metodology applied in this study Chapter 4 presents the main conclusions and observations

This paper seeks to examine the practices of food store chain organizations in the North Texas area regarding the development of store management personnel.

Available as part of the thesis.

Mobile commerce is becoming an important component of modern business especially in the retail sector thanks to the fast diffusion of smartphones. This new shopping technique enables consumers to shop wherever and whenever they choose. It also helps retailers to grow their business in omni-channel – many major UK retailers including the “Big Four Grocers” (Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons) have adjusted their digital and category strategies in response to mobile customers. Despite the growing body of literature on mobile commerce, little research has been conducted to provide a comprehensive list of factors that affect the mobile grocery shoppers’ decision-making and their loyalty. In addition, some of the studies had issues relating to inappropriate sampling techniques, which led to unrepresentative findings. This thesis will explore the factors that drive consumers’ intention to use smartphones for grocery shopping, and to identify the key elements that drive consumer loyalty to the mobile grocery provider. Building on an extensive literature review, the key determinants of mobile commerce adoption were analysed with a consideration of issues around online grocery shopping, diffusion of innovation, and customer satisfaction. The key research methods and approaches were compared along with an analysis of the research methods used by the existing literatures, and concluded that a mixed-method approach was the most appropriate way to meet the aim and objectives of this study. Following the research design, the author undertook 32 interviews with shoppers from various backgrounds, 12 of which had previous experience of using a smartphone for grocery shopping. Content analysis was carried out to produce 13 themes relating to the mobile grocery shopping acceptance. Based on the result from the thematic analysis and existing literature, a questionnaire was designed and launched. Three hundred valid responses were collected, including 150 purchasers and 150 non-purchasers. Statistical techniques such as factor analysis and multiple-regression analysis were used to analyse the survey data. Results from the quantitative study suggested there were 7 factors affecting shoppers’ decision to use smartphones for grocery shopping, while purchaser and non-purchaser models showed a different pattern. In parallel, the study also identified factors affecting mobile grocery shopping satisfaction and customer loyalty. Drawing together these findings, the thesis helps grocers to understand their mobile channel customer in a wider angle. It also provides managerial applications to improve both customer experience and digital strategy.

Fashion is one of the most profitable industry in the world, Sweden has been seen as a fashionable nation, thanks to the big fashion brands that consumed by most of the Swedish of all segment. Scandinavian fashionbrands which is analyzed on this thesis is H&M, Kappahl, Ginatricot, Dressman, and JackJones. All of these fashionbrands are analyzed based on their marketing strategy, then compared to the result from the quitionaires about these brands. From the questionaires, it can be found which kind of marketing strategy profitable for their segment. The result of this research show that most of the company know much about their customers, they do the right thing especially with the product design. Sometime the companies do the unuseful marketing that's wasting money because the customers don't react on the desirable behaviour