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Looks at the current status of retail distribution in the European Economic Community. Forecasts likely future developments and problems, suggesting that decisions on distribution will increasingly be made on a supra‐institutional level.

International Development Enterprises (iDE), a non-profit organization, won numerous awards for its poverty alleviation efforts through the sale of low-cost irrigation technologies to the Base of Pyramid (BoP) farmers around the world. This case discusses iDE’s entry into Nicaragua and the challenges this global social enterprise faced in bringing drip irrigation and other water technologies to the rural subsistence coffee farmers in Nicaragua. It presents the tough decisions it faced in 2012 regarding the future of its for-profit social business, iDEal Tecnologias, in Nicaragua. This case captures the tension in hybrid social enterprises.

This case was developed through the following primary sources as well as some secondary sources. Primary: discussions with iDE’s CEO Doerksen, Urs Heierli (Coordinator of iDE’s operations in Nicaragua), and Skype conversations with iDEal Tec’s Country Director, Nadja Kränzlin. Secondary: documents provided by the company and other publicly available sources.

This case is intended for use in undergraduate, graduate, and executive courses in: social entrepreneurship, non-profit management, and managing sustainable businesses. It may also be used in the sustainability module of courses in international business/management/marketing, and business strategy and policy. It would be best to position this case toward the middle or latter half of the course as it is an integrative case that challenges students to evaluate the sustainability of a social enterprise from multiple perspectives.

The theoretical bases for this case are: defining and implementing a sustainable strategy in hybrid social enterprises. Serving BoP customers with a vision of enabling prosperity.

The Annual Report of the Ministry of Health for the year ended March 31st, 1925, has been issued. The section dealing with the administration of the Sale of Food and Drugs Acts states that of the 10,516 butter samples analysed during the year, 151 or 1·4 per cent., were reported as adulterated as compared with 1·5 per cent. for 1923. Loading with water is the method of adulteration now most practised, and 74 samples contained water in excess of the maximum of 16 per cent. allowed; 68 contained foreign fats such as margarine, and 9 contained boric acid as a preservative in amounts exceeding 0·5 per cent. One of the samples which contained excess water was also found to contain 0·44 per cent. of washing soda. At Leeds an informal sample of butter was purchased by the police, and as a result of the Public Analyst reporting it to be wholly margarine, they arrested the vendor, a hawker, and upon conviction he was sent to prison for three months for obtaining money under false pretences. Of the 3,456 samples of margarine reported upon, 33, or 1 per cent., were regarded as adulterated; 24 by reason of containing water in excess of the allowed maximum of 16 per cent., 4 for containing excessive amounts of preservative, 4 for containing more than 10 per cent. of butter in contravention of Section 8 of the Sale of Food and Drugs Act, 1899, and one for containing a large percentage of free fatty acids (rancidity). In a case brought before a King's Bench Divisional Court, margarine was sold under an approved fancy name, but the wrapper also bore the words, “Churned with fresh milk.” It was held that these words did not form part of the descriptive name in contravention of Section 8 of the Butter and Margarine Act, 1907, and that the magistrate was not bound to follow the decision given by the Scottish Court in relation to different words.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate manufacturer encroachment and distributor encroachment in a three-echelon supply chain consisting of an upside manufacturer, an intermediate distributor and a downside retailer.

In this paper, the authors use the optimization theory to mathematize the proposed question and build a model. First, the authors consider sequential quantity decisions, where the encroacher decides on the direct selling quantity after determining the retailer's order quantity. Second, the authors relax this sequential decision process assumption by reconsidering a circumstance in which quantity decisions are decided simultaneously.

In contrast to previous studies, this study shows that in three-echelon supply chains, the upside firm is more likely to encroach compared with the downside firm. The “bright side” of encroachment exists for all players only when the encroachment cost is at a moderate level. However, in manufacturer encroachment under simultaneous quantity decisions, the “bright side” skips the distributor but benefits the retailer directly as the encroachment cost increases from zero to a certain level. The main reason lies in that the distributor loses its pricing power because the end-market has been disturbed by the simultaneous quantity decisions. A comparison of the results of sequential and simultaneous quantity decisions reveals the merit of simultaneous quantity decisions. The authors find that the intermediate role (the distributor in our model) in three-echelon supply chains may benefit more from simultaneous quantity decisions. That is, the distributor may achieve a better profit even in a market with intensified competition.

The findings of this paper contribute to the marketing science literature on encroachment. The majority of existing literature has focused on manufacturer encroachment in two-echelon supply chains. This paper innovatively investigates and compares manufacturer encroachment and distributor encroachment in a three-echelon supply chain.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate steps that a manufacturer can deploy to improve social interaction, learning, and application while facilitating a system of learning across a wholesale distribution channel.

The paper provides a model of how a manufacturer-improved social interaction, learning, and application with their wholesale distribution network using five simple and consistent steps: Excite, Engage, Experience, Execute, and Evaluate.

The 5 E's provided a consistent method for the manufacturer to engage the wholesale distributor in social interactions centered around learning, the L&D practitioner should evaluate the use of the 5 E's as they integrate learning into sales and marketing initiatives.

Using the 5 E's to create social interactions within the learning system allows the manufacturer to manage knowledge sharing and knowledge application with the wholesale distributor.

The conceptual paper outlines the 5 E's utilized by a manufacturer and provides a checklist of practical elements in each step. The model and checklist provides the L&D professional methods which she can use to expand traditional learning environments across sales and marketing.

This research primarily aims to find and analyse the interaction among success factors for improving the performance of Indonesia’s dairy milk supply chain. Further, this research aims to formulate the right policies for improving the performance of the chain based on the success factor that belongs to cause groups.

The paper analyses 10 success factors for improving the performance of the Indonesian dairy supply chain with the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method and analyses the Delphi method to formulate the right policies for improving performance.

There are four important influencing factors that directly impact the overall system, i.e. the number of dairy cattle import, national milk demand, the total number of dairy farmers and the number of dairy cattle ownership or herd size. Several alternative policies have been designed by several experts according to the influencing factors, i.e. the government assists in the procurement of imported cattle, provides financial assistance to farmers in the form of low-interest financing, improves the partnership system between farmers and dairy cooperatives, provides a reward system for the farmers and increases the level of formality of contract between the farmers and cooperatives.

Interrelationships of each success factor and the most important influencing success factors could not be generally determined because it depends on the point of view of the experts. Future research can apply the success factors proposed by this research to the different dairy milk supply chain. Then, this research used only nine experts for formulating alternative policies. Future research may repeat this method using multiple experts to justify the validity of the research. Moreover, this research only explored 21 success factors of the increase in the performance of the Indonesian dairy supply chain. Future research should consider not only the supply side and number of dairy cattle but also several success factors from the causal relationship diagram in the broader dairy milk supply chain.

This research provides essential insights for policymakers, as they have to understand and evaluate the success factors before formulating several alternative policies.

The research has revealed that the right alternative policies can be designed, as the causal factor has been known.

This research contributes to applying a combination of causal relationship diagram of System Dynamic and DEMATEL method as a qualitative and quantitative method in one integrated way through performance dairy supply chain analysis. As a result, this research draws a policy for the dairy supply chain referring to the success factor as a cause for the low performance of the Indonesian dairy supply chain.

Within the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) supply chain, one of the problems facing the distribution channel strategy is the presence of the gray market. The article shows two novel antecedents of the participation of official distributors in this gray channel: Negative impact on distributor performance and the relationship with their supplier. Knowledge of this background helps to preserve the strategy outlined for the official distribution channel.

Data were collected from 172 Spanish wholesale distributors and analyzed using PLS-SEM.

The authors found that the damage through negative affectation in the official distributor's performance and the cooperation provided by the manufacturer, have different effects. While affectation is shown to be a powerful antecedent of participation in the gray market, the effect of perceived manufacturer cooperation does not show strong results.

In business practice, these findings lead the manufacturer to keep transactions carried out in the gray market at low levels and provide cooperation to official distributors to guarantee the official channel strategy aimed at efficiency in the distribution of branded goods.

The background of the gray market discussed in the study has not been previously analyzed in the literature. In this way, the authors contribute to the knowledge of such a common problem as the presence of the gray market in the segmentation of distribution channels of high-demand products.

The long‐awaited NEDO report on the distributive trades in Europe is published this month. It sets out to draw the attention of British distributors to the opportunities resulting from UK membership of the European Economic Community. The booklet examines opportunities for direct expansion by British distributors into other member countries, and also outlines ways in which British distributors could form links with similar organisations in other countries to exchange information or to ensure effective representation of their joint interest within the EEC Commission. The report was initiated by the EDC for the Distributive Trades, who set up a Common Market Working Group to prepare it. Members of this Working Group are listed in the panel opposite; the Chairman was Dr. James Jefferys of the International Association of Department Stores. The bulk of the report consists of a detailed examination of the distributive trade structure in each of the nine member countries of the EEC; this adheres to a regular pattern of a brief description of the retail scene, statistics on manpower and sales, comparative share of sales by form of organisation, and lists of leading retail companies. This section is preceded by an overview of the retail trades and the wholesale trades in Europe, and a description of existing methods of collaboration in European distribution. The third part of the report consists of two case‐studies — a UK company which diversified into Europe, and a French company which expanded into Italy. Finally there are ‘Check lists for Action’ — a list of points for consideration by companies contemplating entry into the EEC; and a suggested method of assessment of how changes in prices of supplies may affect distributors' purchasing policy. In the following pages we confine ourselves to a summary of the first — and most significant — part of the report: present situation and future prospects, an examination of the comparative retail and wholesale structures in the EEC countries, and the opportunities for the UK distributor which are presented. The central section of the report — on ‘Country Studies’ — contains a mass of essential data and statistics, much of it not previously available, which does not easily lend itself to condensation.

Globally a new wave of retailers are threatening the viability of many wholesalers, especially smaller more vulnerable wholesale distributors, as these new wave retailers aggressively compete for the business customer. To better understand this new form of competition, a theoretical model is developed from the organizational buyer behavior literature to explain the relative patronage preferences of business customers for wholesale‐distributors as a supply source versus two types of multiplex retailers ‐ warehouse home centers and office supply superstores. The model, previously untested in the business‐to‐business literature, postulates that business buyers select supply sources based on a “total value of purchasing” criterion. The total value is a function of price and the perceived costs associated with credit services, product‐acquisition services, and risk‐reduction services. The model is empirically tested in both an office supply superstore and warehouse home center setting with survey research conducted in six cities in the USA. Substantial empirical support, with the exception of the credit component, is obtained for the model.

Aims to examine the value of manufacturer access to downstream demand information in managing product introductions and to Identify factors affecting this value.

Simulation based on actual data on 19 product introductions is used for comparing different types of demand information and their usefulness to a manufacturer. Two metrics are introduced. Bias indicates if there is a consistent difference between demand information from two sources. Delay in demand synchronization measures how long it takes for demand information from two sources to start conveying demand similarly in a transient situation.

Finds that, in the supply chain examined, demand variability is mainly induced by distributors, whereas bias and delay in demand synchronization are mainly induced by retail outlets, especially for products with large wholesale packages compared with their sales.

The simulation model is simple and does not enable realistic examination of how a manufacturer could best use downstream demand data in managing its operations. Further research including such mechanisms as forecasts and stock‐outs is needed.

Provides a means for manufacturers to assess when they should invest in gaining access to downstream demand information and to estimate when their traditional information sources start to accurately convey end‐customer demand for new products.

Although it has been suggested that the value of access to downstream demand information could be greatest in situations with transient or irregular demand, such as product introductions, this claim has not yet been thoroughly examined. This study is a first attempt at filling this gap in the theory.