Companies today face more and more demands from society and stakeholders. It is no longer about just satisfying shareholders, sales and making a profit. Consumers are becoming more aware of products effects and the consequences it has on humans, our environment and the generation ahead of us. NGO:s and society request that companies take responsibility and actions toward a more sustainable business. Many investors analyze companies? sustainability regarding social and environmental issues when it comes to choosing a company to invest in.

A pilot-study was used to investigate, types of assistance, assessed needs, outcomes and effects of special-needs assistance given to a subsample of compulsory school pupils in an effort to develop an evaluation strategy for identifying educational impacts of specific special-needs inputs.  Preliminary results indicate a tendency for postive outcomes for most pupils in the pilot group (n = 11) but also that many pupils have residual difficulties.  Pupils with residual difficulties mostly required special education asssitance with Maths, English or Swedish.  More pupils also needed support with behavioral difficulties.  More research and an expanding knowledge base is required in order to effectively evaluate outcomes of teacher support.  Schools need help in devising different methods of assistance and particularly for pupils with behavioral difficulties..

The purpose of this thesis was to illuminate how companies work with their brand identity and particularly how it is applied in their positioning. The empirical data has been collected through interviews with two companies in Sweden working with brand identity as a stated strategy. The study shows that companies discover, develop and build their brand identity based on their core identity and core values. The core value can be strengthened through customer satisfaction surveys. In order to develop the brand identity in companies, management has to be aware of their brand person- ality, as an essentiality for survival.

AbstractTitle:The Impact of Management Control Systems on the Purchaser Function - A study of Scania and Sandvik Authors: Mohammad Reza Akhbari and Johanna Sullivan Svensson Published: 2011 Keywords: Management control, purchasing function, impact, control, control instruments, Key Performance Indicators, measurement, communication and organizational structure. Background and problem formulation: In order for a company?s business idea or vision to be fulfilled, the management of a company needs assistance from various means to intentionally affect the operation in the desired direction. Management control concerns activities of both financial and non-financial character in order to implement the strategy of a company and to reach profitability. Since the purchaser function is responsible of spending 50 percent of a company?s total revenue, the function has an optimal starting point to be a key actor in the shaping and execution of a company?s strategic plan.

Abstract: The fashion industry is perhaps the most unpredictable one where change occurs very rapidly. In order to be attractive and interesting in this competitive industry, a brand must constantly be up to date and differentiated from other brands to attract the consumers. This has given rise to an increasing growth of brands that cooperate for marketing reasons and more specifically, clothing retailers that perform designer collaborations with exclusive designers to create limited collections.Studies describing the effects of those collaborations on the retailers brands are rare and especially from a consumer perspective. Since H&M has been a pioneer in designer collaborations and has done it more times and for more years than any other retailer we have conducted our study on their case. Our intention was to investigate how the designer collaborations have affected the brand equity and image of H&M, if the collaborations have increased the willingness to pay for H&M's other ranges and if they have affected H&M's ability to extend its brand to higher price segments, through an experimental study.

The world has become a globalized place in constant development and much of which is now taken for granted did not even exist 30-40 years ago, such as smartphones or Internet in common households. As new tourist destinations is continuously being created, it becomes increasingly important with effective place marketing to compete in the global market. Developing a good and interesting profile is thus a way for places to become more attractive for tourists. The main theory in the paper is "post-industrialization and the entrepreneurial city" which describes how cities in the global north have moved away from industry towards becoming post-industrial cities ? very often with a strong focus on tourism.

Konkurrensen om kompetent personal ökar och flertalet faktorer används därför för attattrahera och rekrytera kvalificerad arbetskraft. Företag lägger idag stort fokus på corporatesocial recponsibility (CSR) och studier har visat att CSR spelar stor roll för potentiellamedarbetare i sökandet efter arbetsgivare. Syftet med denna uppsats är således att undersöka,beskriva och analysera huruvida studenter på avancerad nivå vid ett svenskt universitet,värderar CSR som en attraktiv faktor hos en framtida arbetsgivare. Den teoretiskareferensramen utgår från tre områden vilka berör CSR, employer branding samt social identitytheory (SIT). Uppsatsen baseras på en kvantitativ metod i form av en enkätundersökningbland 230 studenter på avancerad nivå vid ett av Sveriges största universitet.

This thesis tries to explore how different strategies of internal communication are used in actual situations within an organization. Specifically, the purpose is to investigate how the internal communication within the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) has been carried out during their work to change their organizational structure, and, how this can be understood in terms of existing theories for strategic communication. The research questions explored are:What are the chosen strategies used to communicate the changes internally?How can these strategies be understood in terms of existing theories?What are the views of the employees on the communication and what are the relations between their views, the chosen strategies and existing theories?The theoretical ground work chosen is mainly the work by Cornelissen (2008), Dalfelt (2005), Johansson (2011) and Larsson (2008). The method chosen for the empirical part of the study is semi-structured qualitative interviews.

Nyutexaminerade studenter inom samma utbildning går alla ut med samma teoretiska kunskap, men vad är det som gör att en student skiljer sig från mängden och utmärker sig i ett hav av studenter med samma utbildning? Med denna fråga i huvudet valdes ämnet personal branding, eller personligt varumärkesbyggande, i syfte att få bättre kunskap vad en student kan göra för att bli mer attraktiv på arbetsmarknaden efter examen. Syftet med denna uppsats är att få en bättre förståelse för hur en student kan utveckla det egna personliga varumärket för att bli mer konkurrenskraftig på arbetsmarknaden. Studien är en fallstudie av kvalitativ karaktär där vi genom intervjuer utfrågat två respondenter kunniga inom ämnet men som också innehar en god insyn för just studenters perspektiv.Slutsatsen av studien visar på att med ett starkt personligt varumärke blir man som student mer konkurrenskraftig på arbetsmarknaden och står ut över sina konkurrenter vid sökande av jobb efter examen. Et annat fynd är att det krävs många egenskaper och finns mycket att ha åtanke som student vid utvecklandet ett personligt varumärke som ska ses som starkt.

In June 2013 a debate concerning the consumers? right to a label of origin on food packages was held in the Swedish parliament (www, Riksdagen, 2014). The debate was sparked by some food scandals where labelling was falsely used, claiming something that was not true ? the horse-meat scandal, frozen strawberries infected by Hepatitis A, pork sold as beef, etc. These cases were not only wrong in terms of food safety, but also fraudulent and threating consumers? right to fair origin labelling.

First time labelling occurred was when animal owners marked their cattle in order to distinguish the differences. The need for labelling was added when the trade had expanded during Roman times in order for the customers to know who manufactured their craft. Trademarks are characterized as a way to distinguish one's own product or service from someone else. The marketing purpose is to create an identity. The brand has an important role as an effective competitive tool for businesses.A brand can have many different functions, which will simplify a customer's decision making process in selecting a service or product.

Background: With the increased globalization food prices went down for a while, only to skyrocket to new levels. Prices of organic food, which already were more expensive than conventional, are now even more expensive. The current financial crisis results in reduced consumption which creates a threat to the smaller grocery stores. Globalization and the increased competition have had a negative impact on the environment but at the same time the desire to solve these issues has increased appreciably. The environmental aspect has been given higher priority by the individual, which led to a wider range of organic products and dramatically increased the number of stores selling organic products, leading to a greater competition among the stores selling organic food.  Problem definition: What factors are important for organic retail business long term survival?Purpose: Trough case studies analyze and evaluate the organic niche retail companies? strategies of marketing.Methods: This study is based on both qualitative and quantitative research methods.

This study aims to explore purposes of daily workshops for persons with disabilities. The method used was qualitative interviews. An inductive research strategy was used. Half-structured interviews with six managers of daily workshops were carried out, wherein they expressed their intentions with the daily workshops and the reasons for people to participate. The interviews were analysed with Antonovsky´s salutogenetic perspective, in which Sense of Coherence, SOC is a main concept, and with the normalisation principle.

This Master Thesis within Marketing and Strategy investigates the values customers perceive within the Real Estate market in the inner City of Stockholm. The dependent variable is customer satisfaction, and it could be explained by 1) the feeling of light and uniqueness of the apartment, 2) that the apartment is of a satisfying size, 3) the address of the apartment, 4) and the economics, the common areas of the building, and the bidding process. The feeling of light and uniqueness, combined with the number of square meters, and the monthly fee of the apartment, are also identified as the price driven functions of this market. A quantitative method is used to investigate the market, where 107 apartment buyers completed a survey..

Objektorienterade mönster och omkonstruktion är två olika designstrategier som har ett gemensamt mål: att göra mjukvarusystem mer förändringsbara och mindre komplexa. Mönster tillämpas för att förebygga utvecklingen av komplexitet i mjukvara. Omkonstruktioner görs för att reducera komplexitet som redan uppstått i mjukvarans inre struktur. Denna rapport identifierar fyra grundläggande strukturproblem som gör mjukvara onödigt komplex och svår att förändra: duplicerad kod, villkorslogik, långa metoder och bristande inkapsling. Rapporten visar hur objektorienterade mönster kan införas i mjukvara genom omkonstruktion och göra mjukvara mer förändringsbar genom att reducera de fyra nämnda strukturproblemen.