The furniture retail industry in Sweden has gone trough large changes during the last decades. Today the industry is tough and in the maturity stage where few new companies enter, especially if they do not have a unique offer. The furniture companies have become larger and fewer, the changes have lead to difficulties for smaller and medium sized companies to grow and be profitable.

Our purpose is to analyse, evaluate and compare three smaller companies in Stockholm with the intention to find what kind of marketing strategies they are using to survive on the Swedish market. First we interviewed the three companies to see what they do to survive on the market, then we asked 100 persons to fill in a questionnaire to see if they had the same opinion as the companies described.

With help from theories we prepared questions which laid the foundation to the empirical part of the essay.

The result from this study shows that the three companies differ from each other when it comes to using relationship marketing and placing the customer in the centre. All of them are aware of the importance of doing so, but because of different limits and possibilities they can not fully adjust everything to the customer. None of those three have clear formulated marketing strategies, but they all tend to focus on service in the stores and good quality products.

A conclusion is that small companies have to focus on a start position in the market which the larger competitors have not notice, or have chosen to ignore. If they do not have a unique offering, it may not be worth entering this competitive and mature market. The most important competitive factors are quality and service, since the small companies can not compete with the larger competitors on the price.