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Current research on industrial management strategy is mostly directed at industrial end customers. In doing so, current research overlooks one critical constituency – industrial retailers, i.e. companies selling products manufactured by industrial manufacturers to other companies using these products to create a finished product or service. Since the current literature states that retailers are mostly interested in category profit margins and profitability (regardless of specific brands), it is not clear whether industrial retailers value brands at all. The purpose of this paper is to determine the importance of industrial brands versus other purchase criteria for industrial distributors.

Three studies are conducted to examine the importance of brands vis‐à‐vis other purchase criteria for industrial retailers and end users. In a longitudinal study employing conjoint analysis the authors find that industrial brands have a larger impact on industrial retailer choice than product price or margin.

First, these results suggest that industrial brands are a strong purchase driver also for industrial retailers (and not just industrial end users). Second, industrial marketing managers are thus well advised to invest in brand building to positively impact industrial retailer choice, rather than reducing prices or increasing product margins as the prevailing literature suggests. In conclusion, these studies seem to suggest that retailers use brands not only as associative or predictive cues of product performance, but also as predictive indicator of a product's expected future profitability.

From a theoretical point of view, the authors’ studies suggest that industrial brands not only transmit cues to prospective end‐customers, but also send cues to intermediaries – such as industrial retailers – which influences their decision‐making processes. The strong importance B2B retailers place on brands as key purchase factor is an indicator that retailers use brands not only as associative or predictive cues of product performance, but also as predictive indicator of a product's expected future profitability (i.e. profit margins and asset turnover), which positively affects retailers’ own profitability. The results of this study are also an indication that the relationship between industrial manufacturers and industrial retailers are probably driven more by considerations of cooperation than by considerations of conflict.

As a managerial implication, it is suggested that industrial marketing executives should invest in brand building to positively impact industrial retailer choice, rather than reducing prices or increasing product margins, as the prevailing literature suggests.

In this paper, three separate empirical studies are conducted to examine the role of brands in industrial management practice.

The need for innovations to achieve economically viable and green supply chains has been illuminated in recent literature. Closed‐loop supply chains are part of green supply chain management and include traditional forward supply‐chain activities as well as additional activities of the reverse supply chain. Extant supply chain literature calls for a chain perspective in order to avoid sub‐optimization in the chain since changes at one stage can affect the performance at other stages. The purpose of the paper is to analyze how implementation of green supply chain innovations can enhance value offerings along the supply chain.

This research is based on an explorative, single‐embedded case study of a food supply chain. The case is concerned with implementation of green supply chain innovation in terms of biogas technology. The single case comprises four actors in the food supply chain: a retailer, an industrial bakery, a mill, and a farmer. Data collection is based on semi‐structured interviews with persons responsible for sustainability in the respective companies.

The case demonstrates that in order to reach the full potential of a green supply chain innovation, the different supply chain actors must be included. What in isolation of one company's perspective is perceived as a waste can be transformed to a value when the problem area is analysed from a chain perspective.

The paper is based on a single case study that does not provide static generalizations, and it represents the first step on a road to building new theory about green supply chain innovations. Future research can expand the findings by elaborating upon cases of other types of supply chains and supply chain innovations.

The perception of waste in a supply chain can be changed through green supply chain innovations. This case illustrates how obsolete food products at the retail level, which traditionally have been perceived as a waste product with related discarding costs, can be regarded as a valued input by implementation of biogas technology at the industrial bakery company. As a result, other food supply chains can investigate similar solutions.

The paper provides a case that visualizes how value offerings along a food supply chain can be chased through green supply chain innovations. Furthermore, the paper applies a supply chain perspective not only conceptually but also empirically. By focusing on the interfaces between each main actor in the supply chain, this paper contributes to existing research with valuable knowledge of inter‐organizational issues related to challenges of supply chain innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to address global sourcing organisational design through the following research questions: how do the roles performed by International Purchasing Offices (IPOs) change over time?; what are the resources/capabilities required by an IPO for an effective performance and how do they change over time?; and what are the contingent factors affecting such changes?

The authors employed an exploratory multiple case study approach and analysed 14 Western IPOs located in China for a period between 2007 and 2012. The data were primarily collected through 34 direct, semi-structured interviews of IPO heads and sourcing managers or senior buyers.

The authors identify and discuss the importance of ten roles played by IPOs and 12 required resources/capabilities. Furthermore, considering the changes that occurred to these IPOs over a five-year period (2007-2012), the authors observe three distinct evolutionary behaviours (i.e. “overall development”, “selective development”, and “stable configuration”) and highlight three contingent factors that jointly affect these behaviours (i.e. the architectural and technological complexity of the sourced items, annual volume sourced abroad, and experience in the foreign context).

This paper contributes to the resource-based view of the firm in a global sourcing context by highlighting the resources/capabilities required by IPOs and discussing their characteristics. Furthermore, it proposes a typology of IPO micro-organisational evolutionary behaviours. Finally, it applies contingency theory and identifies three factors that might affect the evolutionary behaviours.

Environmental dynamics affect all sectors, and retailing is no exception. Scholarships reveal that, in such turbulent times, entrepreneurial characteristics are essential for business. In academic research, entrepreneurial characteristics like entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and entrepreneurial competence (EC) are seldom evaluated for retailers. This study aims to decode the impact of small retailers’ EO and EC on firm business performance (BP). It also traces the mediation effect of EC in the relationship between EO and BP.

The study executed among 740 small retailers is a pioneering work to trace EO’s efficacy via EC on the retailer’s BP. The present research is a primal work in the Indian context. This work redesigns the EC scale to suit the retail context and evaluate its mediation role in the EO and BP relationship.

Examining the mediation model through structural equation modelling (SEM) adds empirical evidence to entrepreneurial value creation (EVC) theory and throws light on the indispensable qualities required for small business retailers. The outcomes of the SEM model portray that there is an association between the EO, EC and BP.

This study, though carried out methodically, it is constrained by the ensuing intricacies. The investigation was limited to the small- and medium-retailers engaged in retailing with a floor space from 500 to 5,000 square feet. All three constructs used in the study are measured using the self-reported perceptual scale, which infuses the subjectivity in the data. Exploring the EO and EC of widely dispersed retailers, examining the entrepreneurial character of large-format independent retailers and evaluating financial performance measures through retailers will add value to the study in future.

The study verified the central role of EC in the intangible resource-reward relationship. Among the five pillars of EVC theory, the role of intention and external finance are not considered in this work. The present work explored the EO and EC of existing retailers, and hence intention is excluded. The study concentrates on small retailers, and the role of external financing is not explored. Mishra and Zachary (2014b) opined that the EVC process should be studied in different context and listed out several prepositions. Considering the role of intention and external financing and studying several prepositions spelt out in the theory in varying contexts will throw more lights on the EVC process.

In the 1990s the trend of textile and apparel manufacturing in Italy differed considerably from other European countries with high labour costs. The examination of the peculiar factors generating the Italian specificity represents the first aims of this paper, and will be discussed employing statistical sources concerning market performance, industrial organization and retail structure. A second aim, of no less central importance, is the evaluation of the strategic behaviour adopted by Italian textile and apparel firms in front of competitive change on international market. Results emerging from a secondary research are presented. The analysis proposed focuses mainly on strategic market positioning and integration between manufacturing firms of the textile‐apparel pipeline and clothing retail.

The U.N.’s perseverance in fostering sustainable industrialisation has not rendered the expected results in the long run. Despite that the scope of SDG9 is reasonably well defined and communicated, there is much more to be done to make it a reality. Achievements on SDG9 have not been as positive as they might have. It should be noted that there is no trustworthy source of information that indicates with certainty the progress towards the 2030 agenda. The purpose of this chapter is to examine factors involved in the SDG9 reporting and other critical issues necessary to understand the progress and how we are progressing towards SDG9. From this point on, data for our debate come from several sources. Still, the primary outcomes come from the 2017 High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, the Sustainable Development Goals Report 2020, the 2020 Voluntary National Reviews (VNRs) independent assessment, and other Sustainable Development Goals (SDGS) reports as well as scientific literature. Unfortunately, there appears to be a lack of reliable SDG9 information available, and what exists is hard to find. In general, information sources often offer qualitative information, and quantitative data are scarce. This situation is especially the case for the documents presented in the chapter, which provided a few statistics disaggregate data, making it challenging to analyse in-depth. The debate here presented does not seek to be a fully comprehensive assessment of their content. The analysis is not designed to interpret or replace the referenced documents, either. Instead, it is intended to illustrate the difficult task of measuring the progress towards SDG9.

The purpose of this study is to develop a novel and practical series-parallel inventory-redundancy allocation system in a green supply chain including a single manufacturer and multiple retailers operating in several positions without any conflict of interests. The manufacturer first produces multi-product and then dispatches them to the retailers at different wholesale prices based on a common replenishment cycle policy. In contrast, the retailers sell the purchased products to customers at different retail prices. In this way, the manufacturer encounters a redundancy allocation problem (RAP), in which the solution subsequently enhances system production reliability. Furthermore, to emphasize on global warming and human health concerns, this paper pays attention both the tax cost of industrial greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of all produced products and the limitation for total GHG emissions.

The manufacturer intends not only to maximize the total net profit but also to minimize the mean time to failure of his production system using a RAP. To achieve these objectives, the max-min approach associated with the solution method known as the interior point method is utilized to maximize the minimum (the worst) value of the objective functions. Finally, numerical experiments are presented to further demonstrate the applicability of the proposed methodology. Sensitivity analysis on the green supply chain approach is also performed to obtain more insight.

The computational results showed that increasing the number of products and retailers might lead into a substantial increase in the total net profit. This indicated that the manufacturer would feel adding a new retailer to the green supply chain strongly. Moreover, an increase in the number of machines provides significant improvement in the reliability of the production system. Furthermore, the results of the performed sensitivity analysis on the green approach indicated that increasing the number of machines has a substantial impact on both the total net profit and the total tax cost. In addition, not only the proposed green supply chain was more efficient than the supply chain without green but also the proposed green supply chain was very sensitive to the tax cost of GHG emission rather than the number of machines.

In summary, the motivations are as follows: the development of a bi-objective series-parallel inventory-RAP in a green supply chain; proposing a hybrid inventory-RAP; and considering the interior point solution method. The novel method comes from both theoretical and experimental techniques. The paper also has industrial applications. The advantage of using the proposed approach is to generate additional opportunities and cost effectiveness for businesses and companies that operate utilizing the green supply chain under an inventory model.

In the literature on product branding, significant attention is given to brand equity in the consumer context, but relatively little attention is paid to the application of the concept in the business-to-business (B2B) context. Even less research exists on the role of brand equity in the retailing context. Retailers are often seen as irrelevant to the source of brand value, resulting in manufacturers not targeting retailers to help them build stronger brands. Potential occurs, therefore, for some channel conflict to exist between manufacturers and retailers. On the one hand, retailers tend to focus on building their own, private brands to differentiate themselves from other retail competitors and to increase their power in relation to manufacturer brands. At the same time, most retailers still need to create a good image in the consumer marketplace by selling famous, manufacturer-branded products. In other words, retailers often have to sell famous brands even if they would prefer to sell other brands including their own. Manufacturers tend to focus their brand-building efforts on the consumer market to entice consumers to insist that retailers stock their brands, rather than placing any real emphasis on building a strong and positive brand relationship with the retailer directly.

The purpose of this article is twofold: first, to review the literature in order to assess the opportunities and the possible welfare effects of differentiation strategies in the food market; and second, to analyse the current structure and organisation of the fresh produce market (fruit, vegetable, and salad) in the light of new product procurement, innovation, and differentiation policies carried out by retailers at the global level.

The paper used a single dyadic case study across two countries (Italy and the UK): the primary producer is engaged in “partner” supply to a principal category management intermediary for channel leading multiple retailers.

First, equilibrium in differentiated markets is not stable, and a welfare assessment is difficult. Second, a differentiation strategy in the market for fresh produce might benefit retailers more than in other sectors, which seem to be consistent with the theoretical findings. Third, when retailers engage in product differentiation it is more likely that channel relationships shift from collaborative to competitive types, with the power imbalance becoming the disciplinary means by which vertical coordination is achieved and maintained.

This article was based on a single case study.

For suppliers it could be wise to agree to some inequity as the cost of doing business, especially when smart large retailers carry out successfully competitive strategies with positive spill‐over effects on the upstream firms.

Using the industrial economic literature on the effects of differentiation strategies (horizontal and vertical differentiation) on market structure, firms' performance, and welfare effects, this paper analyses case findings from a study in the fresh produce industry and will be of interest to those within the field.