A travers le cas des fournisseurs de Marques de Distributeurs (MDD) en agro-alimentaire, cette thèse vise à montrer que la satisfaction du fournisseur peut être expliquée par la proximité entre ce dernier et son distributeur. En adoptant une posture épistémologique positiviste et une démarche hypothético-déductive, nous avons réalisé une revue de littérature qui a permis d’élaborer un modèle conceptuel. Celui-ci postule que la proximité, déclinée en quatre dimensions-proximité relationnelle, proximité identitaire, proximité de processus et proximité géographique, est un antécédent de la confiance et in fine de la satisfaction de cette relation B to B. Afin de tester les hypothèses formulées, nous avons ensuite mené une étude empirique auprès de 93 fournisseurs de MDD de la Grande Distribution Alimentaire. Une première phase de collecte des données s’est déroulée au salon MDDEXPO en avril 2014 et a permis de recueillir 51 questionnaires. La deuxième phase de collecte a été réalisée via le réseau social numérique professionnel VIADEO et a permis de recueillir 42 réponses. Puis, nous avons soumis notre modèle au test avec la méthode PLS sous le logiciel SMARTPLS3. Les résultats de cette recherche montrent que deux dimensions de la proximité permettent d’accroitre directement la satisfaction du fournisseur de MDD de la relation, sans « passer par la confiance du fournisseur de MDD envers son distributeur ». / Through the case of private label supplier in food sector, this thesis aims to show that the satisfaction of private label supplier can be explained by the proximity with his distributor. By adopting a positivist epistemological position and hypothetical-deductive approach, we conducted a literature review that allowed us to develop an integrative model made up of four dimensions: relational proximity, identity proximity, process proximity and geographical proximity. Then realized an empirical study alongside 93 suppliers of private label. A first data collection stage took place in MDDEXPO on April 2014 and has enabled to collect 51 questionnaires. The second phase of collection was done via VIADEO and which came up with 42 responses. Further, we submitted our model to test using PLS method under SMARTPLS3 software. The results of this research show that two dimensions of proximity have direct relationship with increasing private label supplier satisfaction. They are, in the order of importance of structural relations, level of cooperation (relational proximity) and adaptations (process proximity). They also indicate that three dimensions of proximity are used to increase the satisfaction of private label supplier. They are , in order of importance of structural relationships, identity proximity (shared values), social bonds (sub-scale relational proximity) and geographic proximity. Moreover, they show that two sub-dimensions of proximity do not significantly influence the confidence nor the satisfaction of private label supplier to its retailer. It is a question of information exchange (relational proximity) and idiosyncratic assets (process proximity).

This thesis deals with retailer-supplier relationships within the food chain, and with possibilities of their regulation. The aim is to assess the effect of regulation of retailer-supplier relationship, through "Act on Significant Market Power and Abuse thereof" on particular food chain members, and eventually to propose an alternative solution of their regulation. The thesis states the following hypothesis: The Act on Significant Market Power does not change bargaining power between suppliers and retailers. The thesis is divided into five parts. The first of those defines the issue of retailer-supplier relationship, especially the so called "unfair practices". The mind-set of the European Commission which judges the unfairness of a practice, according to its impact on consumer, investment and competition is stressed. When comparing market shares and profit abilities, it is obvious that supplier sector is not disadvantaged in relation to retailing, however, there are cases of small and medium enterprises over which retailers can impose their bargaining power. Retroactive changes and excessive risk transfer on a business partner are then indicated as unfair, which is confirmed by microeconomic analysis. The second part maps means of regulation, through hard and soft law in the EU and its member states with focus on the Czech Republic, where the Act No. 395/2009 Coll., on Significant Market Power in the Sale of Agricultural and Food Products and Abuse thereof is applied. It is found that regulation within the EU is heterogeneous and the results of different regulatory mechanism in different countries differ. The third part talks about self-regulatory possibilities constituted by corporate social responsibility. The main solution of retailer-supplier relationships is represented by stakeholder dialogue, in which contractual parties look for the basis of their antagonistic positions (which are hidden in their interests and needs), and try to identify mutual needs and to create shared value. This approach increases the created value, which is advantageous for both partners, instead of redistributing the value to the benefit of the stronger partner. The fourth part presents the results of a survey conducted among retailers, retailer suppliers and farmers, their opinions about the Act on Significant Market Power, about changes caused by this Act and about particular unfair practices. It was realised that the Act does not help the suppliers very much, in that the bargaining position was improved only with a tiny part of the respondents, and the Act even did not fulfil the role of small and medium sized enterprises protection. The everyday practice of retailer-supplier relationships remains (after changing few legal formulations in the contracts) almost the same as it was before the Act came into force. The only considerable change is shortening the payment period to 30 days; however, there are suppliers that are not content about this provision. The farmers do not feel any consequences of the Act; retailers regard it as business barrier and excessive regulation. Thus, this part confirms the hypothesis. The final part of the thesis proposes a solution to this issue by engaging many stakeholders: the business partners (self-regulation), the State (regulation through general universal act), consumers, non-governmental organisations and media (generating demand for responsible behaviour of firms).

The technology of today enables several alternatives to obtaining food in physical stores, such as home deliveries of groceries or take away deliveries. Traditionally grocery retailers have focused primarily on products, but as time changes and customer values shift, grocery retailers must focus on customer experience to establish a relationship between the company and customers to stay competitive on the market. The aim of this study was to investigate what data are required, and where in-store these data should be collected, to draw conclusions about customer experience in a grocery store. Furthermore, to investigate how the graphical user interface of an application collecting that data in-store in grocery stores should be designed and evaluate the usability of the produced proof of concept-application in terms of subjective satisfaction. The implementation was done iteratively, where the first set of requirements were based on a literature study and contextual inquiry, and the other prototypes were evaluated through user testing and interviews. The final high-fidelity prototype was evaluated by the System Usability Scale. The study defined customer experience as the cognitive experience, the affective experience, the social experience, and the physical experience. Data on each of these aspects should be collected to measure customer experience and will give an indication about the  customer experience in the store. Measurement should be done on one of the touchpoints identified in the study. The application created was a usable system according to the SUS evaluation but may not be extensive enough to replace all other measurements, and a mix of techniques should be considered.

Small apparel retailers face extreme competition with larger retailers. Large retailers have the upper hand in resources to stay updated with various trends, specifically social media. Social media has lowered the barriers to enter the retail industry. However, once these small retailers enter, half of them fail because they don't attract and retain customers. Small-medium enterprises (SMEs) greatly impact the economy, so it is important to study various facets of their business to increase performance. The purpose of this study is to investigate customer's development of social capital (i.e. affiliation, responsiveness, shared values, norm of reciprocity) in small apparel retailer's Instagram page that ultimately lead to purchase intentions for the retailer. Perceived benefits (i.e. perceived usefulness, perceived enjoyment) are also investigated in relation to purchase intentions. More specifically, social bonding, brand identification and trust are examined as mediating variables between the perceived level of social capital, perceived benefits and purchase intentions. Over a 3-month period, 200 responses were collected from students at a southern university. The findings reveal that younger customers develop a relationship with retailers on Instagram and it transfers to behavioral outcomes towards the retailer. The theoretical contribution of this study draws from the lack of literature for small apparel retailer and social capital built in Instagram, leading to purchase intentions. Managers can implement the findings into their social media marketing strategies to improve business performance. Lastly, this study has methodological limitations that creates opportunity for future studies.

The thesis deals with finding such a competitive strategy, which enables a well-established Copany to remain on the leading edge of sales finance market in the Czech Republic. To do that, it is necessary to acquire as detailed information about competitors´ activities, professional environment development and end-user preferences trend, as possible. Based on this information it proposes possible models of strategic options including the impact on customers, business partners and internal issues.

The master’s thesis is proposal of loyalty program of food reailer, which should serve as a tool for building relationship with the costumers and potential for creating competitive advantage. In order to program be best used by the company, should serve an analysis of current situation in the company, then also present loyalty program analyses and analyses of needs and wisch of company’s costumers, as well as researching loyalty programs in other companies in Czech Republic and foreign countries. Klíčová slova

Customer retention also referred to as Customer loyalty has been proven to be an important factor in the success of online retailers. However, recent research has shown that many online retailers are still unenlightened on the elements they need to focus on in order to retain their customers. On the contrary, Amazon which operates in a business ecosystem has been found to have high customer loyalty which means that the company must have been able to modify rightly the appropriate contributors to online customer loyalty compared to the many other online retailers. Studies have been conducted to investigate different variables including customer satisfaction and trust to find out if these variables can be applied to improve online customer loyalty. Still, there has been no research that has investigated how customer satisfaction together with trust in the context of a business ecosystem may influence customer loyalty. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate how online retailers create customer loyalty as a result of online customer satisfaction and trust in the context of the business ecosystem, by applying the case study of Amazon. The most suitable way of conducting this research was to collect quantitative data from Amazon customers who had shopped more than twice within the last two months from the time of participating in the self-completed survey. The questionnaire was distributed in different Facebook groups and was also shared with a number of participants via email. In order to answer the research questions and fulfill the study purpose, the data was analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences, and correlation and regression analyses were conducted. The findings indicated that customer satisfaction and trust in the context of a business ecosystem are the key factors in establishing customer loyalty. In addition, trust in the context of a business ecosystem contributed more to predicting customer loyalty in comparison to customer satisfaction.

The fundamental purpose of this thesis was to determine how effective is the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) to predict and explain shopping for embarrassing products in single and multi-channel. This is important because multi-channel consumers buy more, the question is why (Neslin, Grewal et al. 2006). The question was answered by comparing consumer behaviour in three different channels: drugstore, internet and multi-channel. The Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) has been successful to predict intentions for a wide variety of products and behaviours. However, little is known about how effective it is when the behaviour under study is influenced by the emotion of embarrassment. Similarly, the TPB is parsimonious and has a good predictive power; nevertheless, this thesis identified that the TPB could be more effective if it considered: (1) the role of positive and negative emotions (2) other determinants of choice like personality and demographics (3) variables that are useful to make marketing decisions like the synergistic effect of brands, retailers and channels (4) variables that explain consumer response like approach and avoidance. To provide a comprehensive theoretical framework that is able to understand single and multi-channel, this thesis integrated the TPB within the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework. To evaluate the proposed model, the study used a context and target product that resonated with the theory: the purchase of Regaine (a hair loss product that is embarrassing to buy) in Boots (a well-known UK. multi-channel drugstore). The embarrassing nature of Regaine created differences in the importance that variables play in each channel. The results were analysed using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) and the three shopping environments were compared using multi-group analysis (MGA). The effectiveness of the TPB was improved. The variance explained (R² to intention) was 73 percent for the drugstore, 67 percent for the internet and 54 percent for multi-channel. However, subjective norm (SN) was the only factor that achieved significance for the three shopping environments. Personality and demographic factors had a low but significant moderating effect on intention. This thesis built on a series of contributions in different areas, such as the TPB, attitudes, subjective norm, perceived behavioural control, embarrassing products, multi-channel, marketing, emotions, personality and demographics. Future research should expand this thesis to other embarrassing products, industries and social media settings.

Purpose: The increasing importance given to sustainability issues by governments, companies, consumers, suppliers, researchers, students and the authors of this paper in addition to the scarce empirical studies on the topic of sustainable last mile logistics operations in the food retail industry in Sweden provides relevance to the choice of topic. This paper presents an exploratory single-case study on a Swedish food retailer with a strong sustainability-oriented decision-making body, and will seek to understand how they manage to adopt best sustainable practices and which drivers and most responsible for it. Objective: The aim of this study is to present through an empirical study, how food retailers operate their last mile logistics operations according to the triple bottom line approach, contributing to this young field where a profusion of data to confirm the existing theory remains deficient. Furthermore, the focus is placed on the different drivers for food retailers to adopt sustainable practices in their transportation operations from the distribution warehouse to their stores located in urban areas. Approach: A Swedish food retailer that strives for best practices will be studied in order to obtain key empirical data, which will allow the authors to compare theory and empirical data.  The study will focus on the sustainability-oriented operations approach in the Last Mile Logistics of the chosen retailer and observe the different drivers regarding their operations following all aspects of the triple bottom line. A single-case study analysis of a leading company in terms of sustainability-driven operations will provide more insight on how this “category” of food retailers manages to operationalize their environmental-friendly culture and strategy for inbound Last Mile Logistics successfully, without losing their competitive edge and remaining economically sustainable. Findings: After juxtaposing the secondary data issued from the existing theories on sustainable LML in the food retail industry to the primary data obtained from Axfood, a Swedish food retailer, the results have demonstrated that a business cannot neglect economic drivers to be financially sustainable, (cost optimization, enhanced efficiency, etc.) it remains important and cannot be overridden to enable a shift towards optimal sustainability practices in LML operations. However, the drivers that have proven to make the cut in order to succeed in achieving best sustainable practices are; a highly proactive management, stakeholder pressure (particularly consumers and NGOs amongst others) and innovative technology (including those that imply a short-term economic trade-off for long-term greater good to the TBL dimensions). Keywords: Sustainability; Sustainable practices; Last Mile Logistics; Sustainable Last Mile Logistics; Triple Bottom Line; Food Retailers; Food Retail Industry; Drivers.

Abstract The affinity between mobile devices and electronic commerce is strong, and mobile commerce is a large potential market, as an offshoot of electronic commerce. The margin between electronic commerce and mobile commerce is becoming gradually thinner. The mobile device is more than a transaction tool; it plays a central role in the whole of online shopping as a connector between retailers, online platforms and online shoppers, with a rich experience of noticeable heterogeneity in online retailing. The study concentrates on the use of the tablet for online shopping, how it correlates to general online shopping and how it differs from other mobile devices regarding online shopping. The study utilised an integration of different research domains (marketing, psychology and a technological approach). This integration gives a broader perspective and deepens the understanding of the research topic. The study adopts a quantitative methodology and utilises survey research, because of the online specific behaviour of tablet users, with structural equation modelling techniques. The study contributes theoretically in four parts. First, the study is interdisciplinary and combines insights from marketing, psychology and information systems literature with an integrated model of tablet commerce to identify the antecedents of customer loyalty and contribute to marketing literature. Second, the study is a comparative study and discovers the impact of security, technology, utilitarian and eminent factors related to customer loyalty to the online retailer, which is a growing trend in two cultures. Third, the study reveals the mediating role of trust in explaining the interaction between reputation and loyalty across borders and the mediation between online shopping experience and reputation, trust, self-efficacy and privacy to predict customer loyalty to an online retailer in a developed nation. Fourth, the study discovered variation by gender in tablet commerce, based on the integrated model. The gender divergence is more significant on one antecedent of loyalty than the others. Managers should also target online customers with promotional offers based on gender differences. The study’s managerial implication has been recommended and future research opportunities have been expanded. / Tiivistelmä Yhteys mobiililaitteiden ja verkkokaupan välillä on voimakas, ja mobiilikaupankäynti on suuri potentiaalinen markkina verkkokaupan sivujuonteena. Marginaali verkkokaupan ja mobiilikaupankäynnin välillä pienenee koko ajan. Mobiililaite on enemmän kuin vain kaupanteossa käytetty väline; se näyttelee keskeistä roolia verkkokaupankäynnissä ja toimii myyjien, verkkoalustojen ja verkkoasiakkaiden yhdistäjänä, ja verkkokauppojen heterogeenisyydestä on kertynyt runsaasti kokemusta. Tutkimuksessa käytetään kvantitatiivista metodologiaa ja hyödynnetään survey-tutkimuksia sekä rakenneyhtälömalleja tablettitietokoneiden käyttäjien käyttäessä nimenomaan verkkopalveluja. Tutkimus lisää teoreettista tietämystä aihepiiristä. Ensinnäkin väitöstutkimus laajentaa olemassa olevaa tietämystä mobiilikaupankäynnistä ja tablettikaupankäynti-ilmiöstä ja selittää uutta suhdetta, joka vallitsee helppokäyttöisyyden, yksityisyyden, maineen ja omiin kykyihin luottamisen sekä väliin tulevien korrelaattien luottamus ja kokemus välillä yhdistelemällä niitä sukupuoli-moderaattorimuuttujan kanssa ja keskittymällä tablettitietokoneiden verkkokauppasegmenttiin, jossa tavaroita ja palveluja ostetaan, joten tutkimus tarjoaa yleisen kehikon verkkokauppakuluttajien päätöksenteolle ollen merkittävä panos alan markkinointikirjallisuuteen. Toiseksi, tutkimus on tärkeä lisä myös siksi, että se vahvistaa kuvatun kaltaisen integroidun mallin toimivuuden ja sen sovellukset eri maissa. Kolmanneksi, tutkimus paljastaa luottamuksen välittäjän roolin maineen ja lojaliteetin rajat ylittävän vuorovaikutuksen selittäjänä sekä yhdyssiteen verkkokauppakokemuksen ja maineen, luottamuksen, omiin kykyihin luottamisen ja yksityisyyden välillä, kun on tarve ennustaa verkkokauppoja koskevaa asiakasuskollisuutta kehittyneillä markkinoilla. Neljänneksi, tutkimus edistää ostouskollisuutta käsittelevää kirjallisuutta verratessaan tablettikaupankäyntiä koskevia kuluttajahavaintoja niin Suomen kuin Nigerian kansallisilla markkinoilla. Kahden maan konteksti tarjoaa ainutlaatuisen mahdollisuuden ymmärtää sitä, kuinka asiakkaat eroavat toisistaan kansalliset rajat ylittävillä markkinoilla käytetyn datan käsittäessä kuluttajia epäsuhtaisilla kansalliset rajat ylittävillä markkinoilla, jotka edustavat kehittyneitä ja kehittyviä markkinoita sekä väestömäärältään pieniä ja suuria markkinoita ja jotka ovat lisäksi kulttuurillisesti heterogeenisia. Tutkimus esittää paranneltua ja räätälöityä päätöksentekoa tukevaa järjestelmää johdon avuksi ja asiakkaiden päätöksenteko-ongelmien ratkaisemiseksi. Tutkimuksen liikkeenjohdolliset johtopäätökset ovat selviä, ja niihin liittyviä tulevaisuuden tutkimusmahdollisuuksia on korostettu.