The business world has been through an extreme transformation over the past decades, which have forced companies to look at themselves from a new point of view. Consumers have a complete new set of ways to gather information and are more motivated than ever to make sustainable consumption choices. This change of attitudes among consumers has made companies focus on other things than price versus quality. A whole new concept has been brought up to questioning: environmentalism. Consumers demand more organically produced products.

The research aims at revealing consumers? loyalty to a high involvement product category, connected to a loyalty membership club. Hence, the study aims at explaining similarities and differences between two markets, differently developed in terms of loyalty clubs. The study used IKEA, its loyalty club IKEA FAMILY and women as the company?s main target group, in a case format to study loyalty membership clubs.

Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) is a further development of the Six Sigma draft to carry through preventing quality measures in developing and designing of new products and processes. With increasing demands on enterprises development processes to be more safety and faster the need of DFSS arise as a product, process and service development concept in the organisations. Design for Six Sigma aims to improve and structure the development process of an organisation and consider the application of the innovation problem solving. The concept aims to leave the structure of the traditional Six Sigma concept and instead, from an innovative perspective, search for new solutions to existing problems. The concept constitute of a toolbox with a lot of quality tools that are divided into phases in a development model.

The study examines selectivity of the customer base and scarcity of a product?s effect on attitude and value towards a product or service. A questionnaire study is made from three different situations. The result varied depending on the situation; however it was found that selectivity of the customer base and scarcity has a great impact on the attitude and the perceived value towards a product or service. Selectivity of the customer base was found having the highest level of impact on both attitude and perceived value.

To identify the underlying forces behind a product hype is difficult and the findings often seem random and unclear. To create a better understanding behind the affecting mechanisms would consequently be a valuable addition to the surrounding research area. The purpose of this paper is to understand if there exist common denominators between different product hypes and in such a case, which these are and how they function. By conducting a case-study on four products which have enjoyed immense sale success on the Swedish market, the possible presence of structural resemblance will be analyzed. From the study we can conclude common denominators such as the presence of an underlying trend and an overbalance of indirect decision basis do exist.

Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) is a further development of the Six Sigma draft to carry through preventing quality measures in developing and designing of new products and processes. With increasing demands on enterprises development processes to be more safety and faster the need of DFSS arise as a product, process and service development concept in the organisations. Design for Six Sigma aims to improve and structure the development process of an organisation and consider the application of the innovation problem solving. The concept aims to leave the structure of the traditional Six Sigma concept and instead, from an innovative perspective, search for new solutions to existing problems. The concept constitute of a toolbox with a lot of quality tools that are divided into phases in a development model.

By exposing their products in blogs, companies have the opportunity to reach out to hundreds of thousands of consumers daily. Instead of using conventional Internet advertising such as banners and ads, some companies chose to make use of product placement in blogs. By choosing to expose their products in blogs, companies use a medium that blog readers are familiar with and can relate to, and can thereby solicit customers for their products and brands.We will examine whether product placements in fashion blogs are an effective way for businesses to market themselves and their products. We measure this efficiency, by keeping a record of the sales of ten product placed garment and accessories that we have selected from four of the largest blogs in Sweden. The stores we examine sales of product placed goods in are volume brand stores such as Zara and H&M etcetera.

Identification and analysis of key success factors for an entrepreneurial firm to achieve leverage when establishing on a foreign market with a premium consumer product..

AbstractCompanies in the Swedish process industry has for a long time spent a lot of capital in high-tech development, which have given them increased ability to compete with high quality and excellent technical knowledge, which has given them greater opportunities to grow on the market. But it?s not enough to achieve success with new products and service; it must also be consistent what market wants and preferably something exceptional. The purpose of this study was to determine the factors that are predominantly success factors and how they may affect the sales target of a new product, in this case Frövi White. Another objective of the study was to examine how Korsnäs Frövi communicates and transforms information as requests and demands from customers into refined material. To obtain relevant information to the study several interviews with respondents from most of the value chain in Korsnäs Frövi has been carry out.

På dagens hårt konkurrensutsatt marknad är inte bara priset en viktig konkurrenskraft, även relationen mellan kund och leverantör kan spela en avgörande roll för om det blir en affär eller inte. Möjligheten att låta kunden vara delaktig i produktutvecklingsprocessen är även ett sätt att stärka kundrelationerna. Uppsatsens syfte har därför varit att undersöka kundrelationerna både från leverantörens och kundens perspektiv. Avsikten med uppsatsen var även att undersöka hur kundrelationer och kundinvolverad produktutveckling kan användas för att skapa konkurrensfördelar inom Business-to-Business. Almedahls var även intresserade av att närmare undersöka möjligheterna för digitaltryck, vilket är en ny tryckprocess för företaget.Vi gjorde därför en fallstudie på Almedahls, ett tillverkande företag inom textilbranschen.

This degree project concludes the Innovation and Design Engineering programme at Karlstad University. The project was carried out by David Brocker, Erik Hallberg and Andreas Hertzman during the spring of 2006 and corresponded to 15 weeks of work per student. Assigner was Martin Larsson at Arexor and instructor at Karlstad University was Monica Jakobsson.Arexor has a patent to a construction of an electrical skirting board with moveable wall sockets, called Electrical Track System. The lowest parts of the interior walls along the floor are today almost always covered by a conventional skirting board. Arexors patented product replaces that with the possibility to move and increase the number of wall sockets by choice along an electrical skirting board.

The design of packages is something that product manufacturers put great effort on. The package is often the consumers' first interaction with a product and consumers judge the product based on the package. A common way to evaluate a package design is to let respondents look at a package and answer which attributes they think the product has. This paper wants to take this evaluation a step further, i.e. it examines if consumers experience differences in taste between two identical products that have different package designs.

The purpose of the study is to explain whether the introduction of a new and different brand by means of a brand extension affects consumers? perceptions of the product category that the brand is launched in. An experiment was carried out to study the following aspects: associations and constellations of associations to the product category, interest, perceived variation, and the perceived similarity with the category from which the brands were extended. In the study, brand breadth in the original product category was used as moderating variable. Aspects found to be affected by the brand extensions were associations to the product category, the constellations of these associations and the perceived similarity with the category from which the brands were extended.

The thesis strives to answer the question whether there are any differences between how young customers, in comparison with older, are affected by brands when buying different products. The purpose is to get a clearer idea about the brands' importance in the future and in that way also to give guidance to companies about how to best market themselves and there products.To answer the question, an experiment was conducted with 480 respondents taking a survey where they had to rate a product after reading a short text about it. Some of the texts stated that a specific brand was behind the product while some said the product was produced by an unknown brand.The result of the study was that young people showed a greater propensity of rating products with a brand higher than products without brands, in comparison with the older respondents. This gives reason to believe that brands progressively will become an even more important tool for marketers and an unmatched asset for companies in the future..

In a society where adults set the conditions for children?s play and generate modern and at times technically advanced products, fundamental characteristics like simplicity, opportunities for motor skills training and learning tend to be neglected. Owing to this, the Linköping-based company Time In wants to introduce a new multifunctional product, which differs from other products in shape and function and lives up to the often overlooked, basic characteristics in a toy.With Time In as the assigner, the purpose of this master thesis has been to use simple means to produce a "learning by playing" concept. Since Time In sells toys and products suitable for children in nurseries and preschools, the development of the products has therefore included a study of nursery and preschool environments.The thesis has been carried out within the Product Design subject area at the Department of Management and Engineering at Linköping University. Concept development has been done in three phases: the Preparation phase, the Design phase and the Presentation phase.