The background to this study is the government’s investment in design and the increase of design education around the country. As a future design teacher (industrialdesign) at high school/college, it is of great interest for me to look closer at student’s attitude towards design and design educations at high school.Questions that have been investigated are student´s attitude towards design; design as a concept but also as a phenomenon. How does the student counselor inform the students of the differentchoices before choosing high school?Does the students view on design correspond to what the student counselor say?What opinion does the student counselor have to the concept design as well as design in highschool? Is design just a craze or here to stay?To get answers I have made interviews with student counselors at two different schools, I have also been in contact with a student counselor on the internet. Their thoughts will clarify thesituation that the students might be in.

Aligning parallell terms in a parallell corpus can be done by aligning all words and phrases in the corpus and then performing term extraction on the aligned set of word pairs. Alternatively, term extraction in the source and target text can be made separately and then the resulting term candidates can be aligned, forming aligned parallell terms. This thesis describes an implementation of a word aligner that is applied on extracted term candidates in both the source and the target texts. The term aligner uses statistical measures, the tool Giza++ and heuristics in the search for alignments. The evaluation reveals that the best results are obtained when the term alignment relies heavily on the Giza++ tool and Levenshtein heuristic..

Aligning parallell terms in a parallell corpus can be done by aligning all words and phrases in the corpus and then performing term extraction on the aligned set of word pairs. Alternatively, term extraction in the source and target text can be made separately and then the resulting term candidates can be aligned, forming aligned parallell terms. This thesis describes an implementation of a word aligner that is applied on extracted term candidates in both the source and the target texts. The term aligner uses statistical measures, the tool Giza++ and heuristics in the search for alignments. The evaluation reveals that the best results are obtained when the term alignment relies heavily on the Giza++ tool and Levenshtein heuristic..

Sammanfattning Uppsatsens titel: Kunden som marknadsförare: en ny modell Ämne/Kurs: Magisteruppsats, FEKP01, 15 ECT Seminariedatum: 2008-01-24 Författare: Alexandra Wahlqvist, Caroline Wallin och Niclas Wejrot Handledare: Gösta Wijk Nyckelord: traditionell marknadsföring, marknadskommunikation, medier, word-of-mouth Syfte: Givet de nya teknologiska utvecklingarna i media ämnar vi undersöka hur marknadsföring och marknadskommunikation har förändrats. Vi åsyftar att utveckla begrepp/modeller som gör det möjligt att bättre förstå fenomenet kunden som marknadsförare samt att relatera detta till traditionella marknadsföringsteorier. Metod: Vår uppsats är av explorativ art baserad på kvalitativa samt kvantitativa empiriska data hämtade från intervjuer och enkätundersökningar. Teoretisk referensram: Denna uppsats är baserad på teorier om marknadsföring, marknadskommunikation samt media. Slutsats: Företagen är medvetna om att word-of-mouth är ett effektivt sätt att marknadsföra men det är inte många som använder det som en uttalad strategi, vilket vi i vår uppsats kommer fram till är möjligt.

Syftet med denna kandidatuppsats har varit att, genom en studie av interaktionen mellan mäklare och dess kunder samt interaktionen mäklare emellan, försöka svara på hur fastighetsmäklaren agerar i sitt dagliga arbete. Metoden som använts har varit en kvalitativ studie vilken genomförts genom en deltagande observation. Mäklarna på en fastighetsbyrå har studerats utifrån ett dramaturgiskt och ett markandsföringsperspektiv. Mäklarens arbete med att skapa legitimitet för tjänsten och en god image illustreras i form av termerna roller, kundrelationer, kundnöjdhet och word-of-mouth. Uppsatsen utmynnar i en diskussion där mäklarens påstådda oumbärlighet som mellanhand vid fastighetsaffärer ifrågasätts..

The Dark Side of the Word-of-Mouse Effect- An experimental study of how negative information in today?s social media can influence consumer perception As a result of the electronic revolution of information dissemination, social media as a phenomenon has come to play an important part, both in society at large but also when it comes to business and marketing. Nowadays, knowledge and opinions about brands and products are spread by reputation through a wide range of social media platforms, a phenomenon which in the literature is referred to as word-of-mouse or electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM).The purpose of this paper is to investigate how people?s opinions towards a company and its product are affected by negative information in terms of eWOM. Or more precisely, whether or not there is a difference in this effect depending on information content, concerning company values on the one hand and product attributes on the other.This was done in an experimental setting where two groups of respondents were subjected to fictitious information of different types using established social media platforms.

AbstractLean production has become one common concept within industries to make the work more effective and to meet today?s hard competition. A challenge for Chinese production is the threat from new low cost countries. It will become very difficult to succeed to produce to a lower cost than these countries; this led to that Chinese companies must develop new strategies, according to Lee and Zhou (2000). This will put China in front of new challenges and new strategies can be needed to retain their strong competitive advantages.

In information retrieval there is a problem with ambiguous words. To solve this problem word sense disambiguation WSD is used. Few studies combining information retrieval and word sense disambiguation have been conducted with Swedish words. The purpose of this thesis has been divided in two. The first purpose was to examine Swedish information retrieval and disambiguation in the query phase.

The purpose of this study is to highlight the opportunities of using social media as a communicative tool to attract and engage customers on different social media platforms. In recent years social media has become an important way for business to communicate with people both national and global. The idea behind this thesis was found when we saw different approaches of how companies used social media as a marketing tool. Through a qualitative approach we did eight interviews with six different companies and two social media consults which have given us a basis of what companies really want to achieve with social media. With these interviews we were able to analyze and discuss the abilities to interact with people and how companies distribute content that engage users and increase their credibility to the company..

Word-of-mouth marketing (WOM) has been considered as one of the most effective marketing tools, yet the least understood. While its lucrative effects have been well proven in academic studies worldwide, little is yet known of why consumers engage in WOM, and what factors actually drive this sought-after behavior, particularly in an online context. While today's research lacks holistic views on the simultaneous effects of multiple WOM-drivers, this paper takes on a meta-analytic approach by building on the pertinent literature to construct an aggregated model, including several previously acknowledged drivers divided into two categories: (1) Brand related drivers and (2) Personal and situational drivers. The authors then empirically examine what drivers are the most influential on WOM in an online social media context. By doing so, this thesis does not only contribute to marketing managers' better understanding of online communications management, it also sheds light on the theoretical knowledge of the behavioral drivers of WOM.

Title: Establishing in China?s ?good-enough? market - A benchmarking study on Scandinavian engineering industries? further establishment in China. Problem discussion: The Chinese market is gaining importance for Scandinavian engineering industries and is by many considered a crucial market to be successful in. These companies have a tradition of producing premium products for premium customers. However, in China many are currently experiencing the threat from local competitors producing products of somewhat less quality aimed at the vast Chinese middle market - the good-enough market.

The thesis examines the nineteenth century German philosopher and philologist Friedrich Nietzsche?s early notion of how a word is generated in the process of perception. It does so by looking at the ?metaphorical transitions? Nietzsche talks about in the essay ?Über Wahrheit und Lu?ge im außermoralischen Sinne? (?On Truth and Lie in an Extra-MoralSense?). According to the relevant passage in ?On Truth and Lie?? an image is first created as a metaphor for a stimulus and a word is then created as a metaphor for the image.

It is important that organizations today focus on continuous improvements in order to face the growing competition in the world. A company needs a corporate culture that supports and encourages the employees to be creative and innovative in their work. This is necessary for the company if they are striving towards continuous learning and development within their organization.The main purpose of this paper is to investigate how the culture differences between Sweden and China affect Sandvik AB. We will also study how the company manages continuous improvements and what consequences culture differences have on their work.Our paper is a single case study at Sandvik AB in Sweden and China. We have visited Sandvik in Sandviken to conduct a series of interviews with employees of different position within the company and with dissimilar work tasks.

The lifecycle of fashion products get shorter and shorter. Companies in the fashion business needto make sure that they can offer their customers the right products, in the right quantity at theexact right time. The competition on the fashion market today is tough and if companies aregoing to be successful they need to have access to the most reliable suppliers, and also offer theircustomers products with high quality to attractive prices. It is therefore of highest importance toevaluate and choose the right sourcing strategy. Product category and type of organisation aresome of the factors that will determine which strategy that is most appropriate.

This study aims to describe how a company behind a well-established brand in the fashion industry has strategically chosen to communicate with their target market. Interviews with four individuals in different positions within the company have generated qualitative data, which is presented and analyzed in relation to the theoretical frame of reference in this study. The results show that the company does not use conventional marketing, but relies rather on marketing based word-of-mouth generated by its customer base due to its unique store concepts. Previous research has shown that this type of marketing strategy is effective and beneficial to the brand equity, a conclusion that is demonstrated to also apply to the survey object of this study. Furthermore, it is also shown that this is largely due to the distinct and coordinated image that the company maintains through strict standardization..