Week's assignement: retail industry and department stores in Turku

This week we were given the assignement to find as much information about subjects that we'll be working with quite closely during this course: retail industry and departmen stores especially in Turku. I found couple of very interesting studies that handle these subjects and are pretty wide so they can be used as background material before we start the actual innovating and get our hands dirty.

https://www.doria.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/87787/Tukkk_KR2-2012%20Marjanen%20Malmari%20DIGIversio_170013.pdf?sequence=1

The first one is a large report made in Turku School of Economics in 2012. It's in Finnish and has a lot of really useful information about what affects consumer behavior in area of Turku and what has changed. The current situation here is really competetive since we have three large shopping centres within quite a little distance that are all competing of the same customers. When we add the department stores and smaller stores in the very centre it gets clear that the competition here is indeed really hard and everyone of them has to have something special to offer for customers to keep them loyal.

http://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/lup/publication/3233399
(click the link on that page to open the report in pfd)

The second one is also a large report made in University of Lund. It's focused on one of these three large shopping centres, on the newest one, Skanssi. Skanssi markets itself as "the greenest shopping centre in Europe" and that's one of the main themes the report is focusing on. The other big theme with this report aswell is consumer behaviour. This one is in English and I think we'll get a lot of very useful and current info out of it. It's been published in 2012.