[pt] A proliferação da variedade de produtos é uma tendência em diferentes indústrias e se constitui em um assunto com crescente relevância para o mundo industrial e acadêmico. A gestão dessa variedade deve buscar equilibrar os benefícios oriundos da perspectiva do marketing com os custos e obstáculos visualizados pelas perspectivas de operações e de logística. Assim, tal gestão se torna um grande desafio para as indústrias em que a variedade de produtos é elevada, como a de higiene pessoal, perfumes e cosméticos. A presente dissertação é um estudo empírico que tem como objetivo analisar esta gestão na indústria de cosméticos, quantificando, comparando e interpretando o comportamento da variedade de produtos oferecida ao mercado brasileiro, utilizando-se como objeto de estudo o xampu. Como variáveis desse produto, considerou-se divisão de mercado, grupo, grife, marca, finalidade adicional, público alvo, característica, cor, embalagem e fragrância. As análises da pesquisa foram realizadas a partir de uma pesquisa na indústria e de um estudo de caso em uma empresa multinacional no ramo de higiene pessoal, perfumes e cosméticos. Verifica-se como resultado da pesquisa que as variáveis marcas e características são as que mais impactam na geração de diversidade demonstrada ao consumidor e que não existe um comportamento padrão para a oferta de variedades de xampus. Já com o estudo de caso, por outro lado, pode-se concluir que a gestão da variedade de produtos está associada à gestão da cadeia de suprimentos (SCM) com intenso uso da técnica de resposta eficiente ao consumidor (ECR). / [en] Product variety is a trend in different industries and it is a subject with an increasing relevance both in the industry and academy. The management of product variety must balance the benefits obtained generally from the marketing perspective with the negative effects obtained, in general, from the operations and logistics perspective. Thus, it becomes a challenge for the industries in which product variety is high, such as the cosmetic industry. This master’s dissertation is an empirical study that aims to analyze the management of product variety in this industry, quantifying, comparing and understanding the behavior of the variety of products offered in the Brazilian market, considering shampoo as the object of the study. As variables of this product it was considered market division, group, signature, brand, additional purpose, target audience, feature, color, packaging and fragrance. The analyses were done by an industry research and a case study in a multinational cosmetic company. It’s verified as result of the industry research that the variables brand and characteristics are the ones that most contribute to generate diversity to the consumer. With the case study, on the other hand, it can be concluded that the management of this variety, is associated to the supply chain management (SCM) with intense use of Efficient Consumer Response (ECR).

This dissertation is concerned with decision making in retail operations management. Specifically, we focus on pricing, variety, and inventory decisions, which are at the interface of the marketing and operations functions of a retail firm. We consider two problems that relate to two major types of retail goods. First, we study joint pricing, variety, and inventory decisions for a set of substitutable" items that serve the same need for the consumer (commonly referred to as a "retailer's product line"). Second, we present a novel model of a selling strategy for "complementary" items that we refer to as ``convenience tying," and focus on analyzing the effect of this selling strategy on pricing and profitability. We also study inventory decisions under convenience tying and exogenous pricing. For a product line of substitutable items, the retailer's objective is to jointly determine the set of variants to include in her product line ("assortment"), together with their prices and inventory levels, so as to maximize her expected profit. We model the consumer choice process using a multinomial logit choice model and consider a newsvendor type inventory setting. We derive the structure of the optimal assortment for a special case where the non-ascending order of items in mean consumer valuation and the non-descending order of items in unit cost agree. For this special case, we find that an optimal assortment has a limited number of items with the largest values of the mean consumer valuation (equivalently, the items with the smallest values of the unit cost). For the general case, we propose a dominance rule that significantly reduces the number of different subsets to be considered when searching for an optimal assortment. We also present bounds on the optimal prices that can be obtained by solving single variable equations. Finally, we combine several observations from our analytical and numerical study to develop an efficient heuristic procedure, which is shown to perform well on many numerical tests. With the objective of gaining further insights into the structure of the retailer's optimal decisions, we study a special case of the product line problem with "similar items" having equal unit costs and identical reservation price distributions. We also assume that all items in a product line are sold at the same price. We focus on two situations: (i) the assortment size is exogenously fixed, while the retailer jointly determines the pricing and inventory levels of items in her product line; and (ii) the pricing is exogenously set, while the retailer jointly determines the assortment size and inventory levels. We also briefly discuss the joint pricing/variety/inventory problem where the pricing, assortment size, and inventory levels are all decision variables. In the first setting, we characterize the structure of the retailer's optimal pricing and inventory decisions. We then study the effect of limited inventory on the optimal pricing by comparing our results (in the ``risky case" with limited inventory) with the ``riskless case," which assumes infinite inventory levels. In addition, we gain insights on how the optimal price changes with product line variety as well as demand and cost parameters, and show that the behavior of the optimal price in the risky case can be quite different from that in the riskless case. In the second setting, we characterize the retailer's optimal assortment size considering the trade-off between sales revenue and inventory costs. Our stylized model allows us to obtain strong structural and monotonicity results. In particular, we find that the expected profit at optimal inventory levels is unimodal in the assortment size, which implies that the optimal assortment size is finite. By comparison to the riskless case, we find that this finite variety level is due to inventory costs. Finally, for the joint pricing/variety/inventory problem, we find that even when the retailer has control over the price, finite inventories still restrict the variety level. We also propose several bounds that can be useful in solving the joint problem. We then study a convenience tying strategy for two complementary items that we denote by "primary" and "secondary." The retailer sells the primary item in an appropriate department of her store. In addition, to stimulate demand, the secondary item is offered in two locations: its appropriate department and the primary item's department where it is displayed in very close proximity to the primary item. We analyze the profitability of this selling practice by comparing it to the traditional independent components strategy, where the two items are sold independently (each in its own department). We focus on understanding the effect of convenience tying on pricing. We also briefly discuss inventory considerations. First, assuming infinite inventory levels, we show that convenience tying decreases the price of the primary item and adjusts the price of the secondary item up or down depending on its popularity in the primary item's department. We also derive several structural and monotonicity properties of the optimal prices, and provide sufficient conditions for the profitability of convenience tying. Then, under exogenous pricing, we find that convenience tying is profitable only if it generates enough demand to cover the increase in inventory costs due to decentralizing the sales of the secondary item. / Ph. D.

In today's market, companies are faced with pressure to increase variety in product offerings. While increasing variety can help increase market share and sales growth, the costs of doing so can be significant. Ultimately, variety causes complexity in products and processes to soar, which negatively impacts product development, quality, production scheduling, efficiency and more. Product variety is just one common cause of product complexity, a topic that several researchers have tackled with several sources of product complexity now identified. However, even with such progress, product complexity continues to be a theoretical concept, making it difficult for companies to fully implement advances and fully manage product complexity. More and more companies are relying on product family design to handle product variety. Broadly, a product family can be defined as a group of products sharing common elements. The advantages for companies using product family strategies can be significant: they enable efficient derivation of product variants, reduce inventory and handling costs, as well as setup and retooling time. The design challenge however, is to select the product platform to generate a variety of products with minimum deviation from individual requirements. Accordingly, the structure of product families makes designing and evaluating them a challenging process. In order to fully embrace the relationships between variety, product complexity, and product families an understanding of product complexity causes and impacts is essential. This research begins by introducing four main dimensions of product complexity within the context of a generalized definition. Product complexity indicators suitable in product design, development and production are derived. By establishing measurements for the identified indicators and using clustering techniques, a complexity evaluation approach for product family designs is also developed in this research. The evaluation approach is also applied on a component basis, to identify Critical Components that are main sources and contributors of complexity within product families. By standardizing identified Critical Components, product complexity levels and associated costs can be managed. A case application of three product families from a tire manufacturing company is used to verify that this research approach is suitable for evaluating and managing product complexity in product families. / Ph. D.

Background: Franchising is one of the most known and used business models for growing a company. It has been proven over the years and has many advantages and disadvantages. For a company to do it successfully and prove to be a profitable decision, it should be analyzed carefully from different perspectives. Purpose: This paper aims to provide a model and structure of how certain managerial factors affect the decision about a franchise store in the retail industry and its impacts on success. Ideas, concepts, theories, and information from previous research will be applied to a private company to analyze this model. The Research Question is: “To what extent do managerial factors concerning franchising a retail company affect its success?” Method: The effect of these managerial factors on the decision-making of franchisors was investigated through the use of real-life data from a private company. Several interviews with the owners of the company and a survey with current customers of the store were conducted to give insights and needed information for the analysis. Conclusion: This paper provides a model which can be used by a company that wants to franchise. Considering the different factors and following the steps, one can successfully decide if franchising is the right growing strategy for the company.

In an attempt to reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction, manufacturers have been adopting strategies such as Delayed Product Differentiation (DPD) while managing broader product lines. In this study, first a general framework on DPD is formed in the light of basic articles in the literature. The vanilla box assembly process which is a special form of modular design type of DPD is modeled and analyzed. In the vanilla box assembly process, inventory is stored in a special form of semi-finished products, called vanilla boxes, that can serve more than one final product. We model the vanilla box assembly process considering the costs of inventory and unsatisfied demand under the capacity limitations, stochastic demand and bill of material requirements. We formulate the model as an extensive form of stochastic integer program in which stochastic demand is modeled using a set of demand scenarios each of which is assigned a probability of occurrence. The model is solved as a standard integer programming model that minimizes the expected value of the objective function. The impact of product demand scenarios, common component levels, shortage penalty cost to holding cost ratio levels and capacity restrictions on the total cost and fill rates is studied. We compare the performance of vanilla box assembly process to assemble-to-order process and provide insights on their performances. Computational results indicate that the vanilla box assembly process is a promising alternative to the assemble-to-order process in most of the problem instances.

[pt] Apesar do avanço das discussões sobre variedade de produtos e de seu impacto na complexidade em sistemas de produção, pouco se sabe sobre como o gerenciamento dessa variedade difere entre os mercados emergentes e estabelecidos. Esta dissertação visa preencher esta lacuna por meio da comparação entre (1) a variedade de produto oferecida pelas indústrias automobilísticas no Brasil e na Europa e (2) entre as estratégias utilizadas pelas montadoras de cada um destes mercados para mitigar os efeitos adversos da variedade de produto. A análise exploratória utiliza dados secundários obtidos na literatura e em montadoras da indústria automobilística e dados primários coletados por meio de entrevistas com gerentes destas empresas. A amostra de veículos considerados na análise representa 62% e 95% dos mercados europeu e brasileiro, respectivamente. Apesar de diversas semelhanças entre as duas indústrias, os resultados da pesquisa apontam para diferenças significativas na variedade de produto oferecida em ambos os mercados e nas estratégias de mitigação adotadas, apresentando assim indícios de que a realidade automobilística brasileira não pode ser considerada como uma continuação da realidade européia, merecendo assim estudos próprios. / [en] While the discussion of product variety has advanced into assessing the impacts of complexity induced into the manufacturing system, little is known how the management of this variety differs between emerging and established markets. This dissertation aims to address this gap by comparing the product variety offered in the Brazilian and European automotive industries, as well as the respective strategies used by the vehicle manufacturers to mitigate the negative effects of product variety. The exploratory analysis uses secondary data collected in the literature and in automotive manufacturers and primary data collected in interviews with managers of these manufacturers. The overall sample of vehicles considered in the analysis represent 62% and 95% of the European and Brazilian markets, respectively. In spite of the similarities that are present in both markets, the research results point to significant differences in the variety offered in both markets, as well as in the mitigation strategies adopted, what gives us material to believe that the Brazilian automotive reality can not be considered as a continuation of the European reality, deserving specific studies for Brazil.

Engineering-to-order is a production approach that aims to develop each customer order from scratch based on specific requirements, and is therefore inevitably characterised by a high product variety. It is clear that this strategy is costly, but previous research is lacking in terms of providing real-life data regarding how a high product variety affects costs. Therefore, this thesis aims to analyse the cost-variety relationship through a single-case study consisting of observations, interviews as well as calculations, with respect to the value-creating process of a Swedish engineering-to-order business. The results reveal that while the cost of variety may not be influenced at the product level, it can be influenced at the component level. Furthermore, the three aspects that drives component variety cost the most are the number of new components in a product, the number of different components at the company as a whole, as well as the number of different suppliers. Of these, the most influential aspect is the time spent working with new components, which consumes roughly 10% of the total working time throughout the value-creating process. Moreover, the effects of these aspects differ across different parts of the process as well as component types. The results show that the largest costs are driven upstream in the value-creating process and for advanced components. It is however difficult to decrease the variety of advanced components as a rather high variety is required to meet customer needs. Instead, less advanced components offer more easily obtained savings. Finally, the thesis also suggests three ways to mitigate the negative effects of high product variety. Firstly, improving the accessibility and spread of information to ensure internal alignment in the management and maintenance of components. Secondly, identifying common synergies across different projects and products to create economies of scale. And thirdly, explore to what extent processes and components can be standardised.

La conception de variété (ou diversité) de produit est un processus essentiel pour atteindre le niveau de flexibilité requis par la personnalisation de masse. Pendant le processus de conception de la variété, les clients et les experts sont impliqués dans la définition de la meilleure solution. Par conséquent, la compréhension des liens entre les connaissances provenant de ces différents domaines, i.e. client, produit, processus est devenue nécessaire. Dans cette thèse, nous nous intéressons en particulier à la formalisation de ces connaissances. En effet, même si plusieurs efforts ont étés accomplis dans le domaine de la représentation de la connaissance, la pensée logiciste (i.e. utilisation de méthode à base de logiques formelles) reste la base de la majeure partie des travaux sur la formalisation de la connaissance. Des réflexions appropriées sur l’utilisation des logiques peuvent montrer les risques d’ambiguïté de la représentation: l’utilisation de la logique conduit souvent à une représentation sujette à plusieurs interprétations, i.e. une représentation ambiguë. Une représentation avec cette caractéristique ne répond pas à l’exigence de bien comprendre les liens entre les différentes connaissances impliquées dans la conception de la variété. Notre travail s’intéresse, donc, au développement d’un cadre de modélisation de la connaissance de conception basé sur l’anti-logicisme. Les travaux sur les systèmes développés à partir des principes de cette école de représentation de la connaissance montrent à travers des applications concrètes dans les domaines de la robotique ou des systèmes multi-agents que les comportements intelligents peuvent être obtenus sans une représentation de la connaissance basée sur les logiques. Ce cadre permet de développer une variété de produit-processus à partir d’une clientèle définie au départ. Finalement, un critère pour comparer les différentes alternatives de variété générées est aussi proposé. Une méthode pour instancier le cadre de modélisation sur un logiciel de CAO 3D a été développée. De plus, un prototype pour utiliser les modèles de connaissance avec un solveur mathématique a été conçu et développé. Les propositions ont été testées sur un cas d’étude industriel, i.e. batterie froide d’un appareil de réfrigération. Ce test a permis de discuter les avantages et les limites de nos propositions / The product variety design is an essential process in order to deal with the flexibility requested by the mass-customisation. During the product variety stage, customers and expert are involved in the definition of the best variety. Therefore a deep understanding of the links between knowledge coming from the customer domain, product domain and process domain is needed. In this thesis the research focus is on the formalisation of this knowledge. Indeed, even if many efforts are present in the knowledge representation literature, logics are always used to build these links. But appropriate reflections about the use of logics can lead to recognise the risk of ambiguity of the representations, i.e. more than one interpretation of the same represented object are possible. This ambiguity would make the represented knowledge not appropriate for the product variety design. In this work, we propose a framework for the knowledge representation based on the anti-logicism. Since the samples of anti-logicist systems (e.g. multi-agents, robots) have shown an intelligent behaviour without a representation based on logics, we use the principles the anti-logicism to propose our knowledge representation framework. A knowledge representation framework that allows to connect the customer requirements to the manufacturing process parameters is proposed. The core feature of the models based on this framework is the non-ambiguity. Indeed, each piece of knowledge that composes the model can be interpreted in one unique way. This feature allows the perfect collaboration between customer, product engineers and process engineering during the variety design stage. Once the pieces of knowledge coming from different domains are integrated in one model, the framework explains how to generate alternatives of product-process variety by starting from a given customer set. Finally a criterion to compare the different generated alternatives of product-process variety is proposed. A method to instantiate the framework on a 3D CAD has been developed. Moreover, a prototype that uses the knowledge model along with a mathematical solver to propose the best variety has been developed. The impact of the framework on the selection process and on the design process of a customisable product (i.e. water coil) is tested. The test of the instantiation and the prototype allows to show the advantages and the limit of the proposals

There are two main views of advertising – the informative view and the persuasive view. This thesis studies aspects of the informative view. One aspect of interest is whether firms can benefit from collusion on advertising even though advertising is only informative. If so, will this enhance or lower welfare? There are several reasons why firms may want to collude on adver­tising. First, the legal field is tilted in favour of nonprice collusion. Second, it is not at all obvious that collusion on price is more profitable than collusion on advertising and third, the analyses of Grossman and Shapiro (1984) and others show that profits can be increased by restricting advertising. In Paper 1, we examine firms’ incentives to collude on advertising and the implications for welfare. We find that collusion on advertising and competition on price is more profitable than competition on both price and advertising. We also find that semicollusion on advertising is detrimental to welfare. This suggests a need for monitoring, especially since it is in the interest of firms to restrict price advertising. We also compare semicollusion on price to semicollusion on advertising. We find that, in general, semicollusion on price does not lead to higher profits compared to semicollusion on advertising. Hence we lend theoretical support to the empirical literature that consistently find evidence of semicollusion on advertising rather than on price. Another important issue concerns the effect, on prices and profits, of ad-vertising only a subset of the product range. Many firms, in particular those in the retail sector, sell a wide variety of products but only advertise a few. Recent empirical evidence suggests that prices of unadvertised products are higher (Milyo and Waldfogel, 1999). Theoretically, little is known. In Paper 2, we study the effects of advertising only a subset of products. We allow for both low and high differentiation and, at the same time, we explicitly model the advertising decision. We find that the extend of differentiation between competing firms plays an important role in the analysis of loss leader pricing. When firms sell products with the same reservation price, loss leader pric­ing obtains only when differentiation is low. When products are less similar however, price competition is less intense and, as a result, firms advertise prices above marginal cost. Our loss leader pricing results enable us to shed some light on the seemingly paradoxical empirical findings in the marketing literature that loss leader pricing fails to increase store traffic, loss leader sales and hence to increase profits. We also consider a different subject – price discrimination. Although it is well understood that movements in the exchange rate have a bearing on firm profitability and hence affect firm behaviour, the role of exchange rate variability in the firm’s choice of the number of varieties to produce has (to my knowledge) not been explored. This, despite the fact that the product mix is an important aspect of firm strategy. By tinkering with the number of varieties, a firm can bolster its ability to extract consumer surplus. In Paper 3, we explore this issue. We show that variability in the exchange rate induces the firm to vertically segment markets (i.e., offer two varieties in each market). This happens because exchange rate variability affects income dispersion and hence the firm’s incentives to extract consumer surplus. To better extract surplus, the firm offers two price-quality menus, high quality variant (priced high) for top-end surplus extraction and a low quality variety (priced low) to address market coverage concerns. / <p>Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan, 2005 S. 3-9: sammanfattning, s. 13-95: 3 uppsatser</p>

Abstract Bachelor Thesis in Business Administration. Bachelor of Science with Specialization in Marketing – Main Field of Study: Business Administration. School of Business and Economics at Linnaeus University, Course Code 2FE21E, 2018 Title: From Bags to Boxes: A Study of the Consumers Perception of Value in Online Fashion Retail Sales Authors: Nadine Bolm, Betty Hartigan Supervisor: Michaela Sandell Examiner: Åsa Devine Background: Online retail sales has been growing steadily since the late twentieth century. Fashion, as a segment of the online marketplace, is the largest market in cyberspace and as new companies are combined with old ones who want to establish a presence online, competition is stifling. As more companies offer fashion in the online world consumers behavior evolves with this new reality and customer-perceived value shifts as the consumers values in their transactions shifts. In order to gain and maintain a strong consumer base companies need to know what the variables are that make up customer-perceived value in hopes of affecting it. Purpose: The purpose of this research is to explain the relationship between values of utilitarian nature, those being; monetary savings, convenience, product variety, product information, and customer-perceived value in online fashion retail and to explain the relationship between values of hedonic nature, those being; adventure, gratification, best deal, idea, and customer-perceived value in online fashion retail. Methodology: The research conducted here was an explanatory study to determine how different independent variables related to a single dependent variable. The study was deductive in nature and used a quantitative approach. Independent variables were studied with the use of a convenience sample and self-reporting survey posted online. Statistical analysis was conducted with data collected from 142 valid responses and through the use of validity and reliability methods the data was determined statistically meaningful and valid to test the hypothesis as accepted or rejected.   Findings: The findings of this study show that a new theoretical model was needed to better demonstrate the direct connection between variables that consumers identified as valuable to them in online fashion shopping, had with consumer-perceived value. By examining data collected through online survey it was determined that of the 8 variables, seen as valuable by research into consumer perceived value, 4 would be accepted as such. These 4 variables would become the basis for a new model that explained how consumers develop customer-perceived value. Conclusion: The research explains the relationship the 8 variables selected by previous research for their effect on customer-perceived value. It also provides a model for future research activities or for development of marketing plans with exceptional efficiency and effectiveness in mind. In directly relating each variable to customer-perceived value on its own merit it was found that the variables respondents valued most were of the more practical or utilitarian in nature aside from one, adventure, which possessed the highest level of value of the 8 variables.     Keywords: Customer-perceived value; Utilitarian value; Hedonic value; Online retail; Online fashion retail; Ecommerce; Monetary savings; Convenience; Product variety; Product information; Adventure; Gratification; Best deal; Idea