The negative trend of newspapers reading gives the owner of several paper manufacturingcompanies in the West worries. Producers should be more concern to strengthen their marketpositions in order to maintain profitability in the paper mills. Holmen Paper is a medium sizedpaper mill company with all of their production in Europe. Sales are mainly made to printingcompanies operating in European countries. In order to strengthen their economic strengthHolmen Paper needs to increase the market share in markets where they have the greatestprofit margins.

One of Sweden?s sixteen national environmental objectives strives to decrease the impact on the climate. By 2020, green house gas emissions should be 40 % less compared to the levels of 1990 and a minimum of 50 % of the energy consumption should come from renewable energy sources. Because of this there is a great need of increasing the production of renewable energy. This is where biogas comes in as a competitive alternative.

Background: Mass customization has been identified as a competitive business strategy by both companies and academics because of its ability to incorporate the voice of the customer into companies? products and services. Although mass customization may sound appealing, the strategic concept is still developing and firms adopting this business strategy face several challenges. Production concerns are of high relevance since mass customization implies a high level of customer involvement in the product design. Since the areas are closely linked it is reasonable to ask how a mass customization strategy affects production concerns.

The bioenergy market has been introduced relatively late in a perspective of the Swedish forestry. Nowadays branches and tops are used more frequently as bioenergy after harvesting. Therefore, it has developed a competitive situation between pulpwood and bioenergy. This situation has even established some questions. Two examples of these are: ? At what top diameter should the final piece of pulpwood be crosscut to get the best economically result? ? Should the top diameter, at the final piece of pulpwood, be crosscut at a thicker or smaller diameter than what is done today? The purpose of this report is to answer these two questions when the harvesting is made motor manually in beech stands.

The market for biofuels from the forests have had a positive development and the job initiators for this master´s thesis wanted to examine the profitability of a method for harvesting forest fuel, which was unfamiliar to them. The method was the ?long tree tops-method?, here called the LT-method. The LT-method is characterised by the fact that timber is harvested as the only roundwood assortment while the rest of the stem, which in other cases would become pulpwood, is harvested as forest fuel together with the logging residues. The method is based on the assumption that advantages in handling of the forest fuel assortment such as increased load weights for forest hauling and truck transportation, should compensate for the lower price for pulpwood when sold as forest fuel. The aim of the study was to compare the profitability of the LT-method with the GROT-method (harvest of timber, pulpwood and logging residues) and conventional logging without any harvest of forest fuel, and aslo to try to identify factors affecting the profitability of the different methods.

Background: As Porter?s diamond (1990) suggested, the business environment highly influences firms? strategies. Today, most of the companies have to decide their strategy depending from a worldwide business environment. Yet, strategy researches and the growing importance of marketing for business success also show that customer dimension must be taken into consideration. On some markets and in certain industries, the offer is much higher than the demand and then, companies need to attract customers.

The purpose of this study is to investigate and increase the understanding of how the two commercial companies IKEA and SAS and the two aid organizations/nonprofit organizations UNICEF and Save the Children use perceptions of Christmas to produce messages in their Christmas advertising/commercial film. The study also discusses if there may be communicative and pictorial similarities and differences in how these brands constructs messages in commercials, and why it may be that the brands choose to use these messages in commercials based on the recipient possible interpretations. The theories used in this study are promotional culture, framing theory, preferred meaning, semiotics (denotation and connotation), myth and rhetoric (ethos, pathos and logos). The method used to answer the purpose and issues are the qualitative method that uses the theories semiotic and rhetoric to analyze the material. The study's results derived from the qualitative content analyzes of the material (the brands IKEA, SAS, UNICEF and Save the Children Christmas advertising films) show that IKEA message might want to show that they want to help the customer and that they pay attention to the customer needs.

High brand equity is a great asset for companies that operate their business in a free and competitive market. Brand equity can arise from both product-related and non-product related attributes and may be viewed from many different perspectives. This study examines which different attributes that contribute to enhance brand equity from customers point of view at the Swedish market for agricultural machinery. The study have been developed using a comprehensive literature search in order to investigate the field regarding brand equity and brand image. The literature review results in one product specific and one non-product specific approach in order to examine factors that contribute to enhanced brand equity. This takes the form as one survey-based approach regarding the non-product related attributes which is examined by interpreting the extra value added by different attributes.

In Sweden, harvesting pre-commercial thinning (PCT) stems for energy purposes is a interesting way of financing the high cost of preparing dense stands for a profitable first conventional thinning. This concept can be labelled bioenergy thinning. The aim of this study was to quantify the productivity of a Vimek 404R light harvester with an accumulating Naarva-Grip cutting head during the bioenergy thinning of a self-regenerated stand west of Sunnansjö in Dalarna. The stand was birch-dominated, contained 15 371 stems/ha, and measured on average 4,6 cm Dbh and 7 m tall. Even though the driver was well experienced with the machine, the stand in question was the first one that he ever thinned in this manner. Nevertheless, the driver strived to accumulate as many stems as possible during each crane cycle and chose to cut taller stems in half so as to make the handling and forwarding of the harvested stems easier.

Products and services have for a long time competed with their brands. For some time now, cities have begun to compete with each other to attract visitors and other stakeholders to come to their town. It is important that the citizens feel as they are a part of the message that the city sends out in its communication.Cities are today working actively with their brands, much like regular companies, in order to create the profile and image in order to be competitive against other cities and places. Cities and places are part of a dynamic process which includes both positive and negative events. These events might have an impact on the brands, and therefore it is a necessity to be able to react on these events to make the most of positive things and deal with the negative in a way that minimizes the effects on the brand.Citybranding as a research field is quite new.

As the media attention society on the world climate change, interest in the environment and social impact has increased. This has in turn made even more companies choose to maintain a sustainability report that contains the three aspects of economic, environment and social impact. The demand for sustainability reports has increased among stakeholders. It has made the companies that establish this form of reports experienced economic benefits. The sustainability report than became a useful way to compete among businesses.

This report is focused on marketing opportunities for small-scale mango farmers in the Nyanza Province in Kenya. Kenya is a large horticultural producer in the world. Horticulture is an important income for a large share of the rural population in Kenya but profitability is low due to inefficiencies in marketing systems and poor infrastructure. The conditions for growing mango in the Nyanza Province are very beneficial and there are two harvesting seasons. Mango offers good income opportunities for small-scale farmers in the Nyanza Province.The aim of this study is to identify marketing conditions that will enable prospering business for small-scale mango farmers in the Nyanza Province, Kenya.

Organizational change is hard to achieve, but if an organization doesn't change it might risk its own existence. Effective resource allocation and increased control of the internal production are examples of how organizations try to increase its competitive advantage. An ERP system (Enterprise Resource Planning) can help an organization to achieve this by providing management with direct access to a wealth of real-time operating information, streamlined dataflow, and making the company's business processes more effective. Like other IT-related projects, ERP investments are associated with large risks. Many projects failure during the implementation in one way or another.

AimThe purpose of this study isthat, from a student perspective, study how the implementation of the school's core values ??based curriculum context is experienced in school activities and the context of physical education.How do the students perceive the basic moral values ??in school activities and more specifically in physical education?Is there ethical aspects of physical education that can be linked to students' moral fostering and if so, how?MethodThe study's methodological approach is hermeneutic and data collection is therefor equalitative in nature. Through focus group interviews gathered material in which aimed to gain insight into students'subjectively experienced life-world in which their experiences, feelings and values ??were at the center. The investigation resulted in the execution of three focus group interviews with four students in each group from three different classes.

Textil- och konfektionsindustrin blir alltmer globaliserad och ställs inför hårdare krav då konsumenterna efterfrågar allt billigare varor i snabb förändring. Sedan flera decennier har europeiska konfektionsföretag flyttat sin tillverkning till länder med lägre arbetskostnader för att uppfylla kraven om låga priser som europiska tillverkare har svårt att uppfylla. En stor del har flyttats till Kina men även till andra länder i Asien. Nu håller marknadsförhållandena på att förändras igen genom tillväxt- och utvecklingsländernas starka utveckling. Förändringarna syns tydligast på Kinas marknad genom stigande priser och mindre kapacitet för europeisk produktion.