SUMMARYLevel: This is a final thesis for a bachelor degree in Business Administration. The thesis is oriented in the field of marketing and written at the University of Gävle.Author: Niklas EnlundDate: January 2014Tutor: Lars -Johan Åge, Jonas Molin & Jens Eklinder - FrickTitle: Intermediaries pursuit to achieve customer satisfaction - A study in how the agent works with factors to achieve customer satisfaction against two opposite parties.Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the intermediary perspective how different factors affect the intermediaries working method to achieve customer satisfaction against two opposite parties.Research question: How do real estate agents work with the four factors; informant, routines, intentions and competences? That is how real estate agents can work; like a good informant, after good practice, bringing together the parties intentions and with their skills. How does the real estate agent work with the factors related to the theories connected to the four factors? Are any of the factors more commonly used by real estate agents?Method: The thesis is based on a scientific theory in the field of marketing and focused on the topic how the agent is committed to achieve customer satisfaction against two opposite parties.

Background: It has been a common perception in the media in recent years that external shopping malls extinguish the trade in Swedish downtown areas. Factors that promote external shopping malls are that customers become more and more indolent and more people buy cars. Despite this fact, downtown areas have a great deal to offer when it comes to creating a pleasant atmosphere. Furthermore, customers are becoming more demanding and want something extra while doing their shopping. More and more shopkeepers therefore realize the importance of events as an instrument to offer experiences to the customers.Purpose: To investigate whether shopkeepers in downtown Linköping consider the external shopping mall in Tornby a competitor or not and, if so, in what ways the trade in the downtown area has been affected by Tornby.

This exploratory thesis uses qualitative research to investigate how digital music is beeing packaged. The main study consists of 11 deep interviews with key representatives of the digital music industry in Sweden. These are (record companies) EMI, SonyBMG, Universal, Warner, (DSP) InProdicon, (mobile operators) 3, TeliaSonera and (cell phone producer) SonyEricsson. Packaging is a concept of marketing that has specific implications depending on which good or service that is being packaged. Packaging occurs at different levels in the production chain.

Our planet is faced with enormous challenges as the extreme weather events related to the human-caused climate change continue to gain strength. The scale of the problem has made changing human behaviour the central focus of sustainable development, and both public and private sector are expected to gain relevant expertise and introduce this work in their agenda. Over its 40-year history, social marketing has become an established field providing tools for social change, but compared to health promotion, sustainability has not been a major focus of social marketing research so far. At the same time, sustainable lifestyles are embedded in complex systems where both individual factors and those of physical and social environment play a defining role in their adoption. Communities are a good example of such environments, and they became the key focus of Community-Based Social Marketing, which combines different insights from psychology to suggest a step-by-step framework for crafting behaviour change campaigns. However, it has not been applied to larger and diverse communities, like cities, and has not focused on sustaining new behaviour over time, which is crucial for creating sustainable lifestyles.

Purpose: The purpose of this essay is to describe the social media usage of five European official national tourism organizations (NTO). The essay proceeds to discuss and evaluate the findings, whilst reflecting on the advantages of social media usage from the point of view of an official national tourism organization.Method: The authors used three different methods of research: one structured observation to study the national tourism organizations? everyday work in social media, one field stimulation to study if and how different NTO respond if a prospective visitor makes them a direct question via social media and finally an email interview to gain insight into NTO?s underlying strategies and policies about social media usage.Theoretical framework: The theories that have been used in this paper include the Uses and gratifications model, theories of one-way and multi-way communication, theories of social media and relationship marketing.Conclusion: By making use of social media the company releases some of its control to the customers as the latter can express their opinions freely in this type of media. One of the advantages of social media is that the platform favors dialogue and feedback. Social media can be used for traditional one-way communication, but works best as a supplement to the regular marketing activities, allowing the activities on social media platforms to focus on branding and building long-term customer relationships.

Background: Increasing globalization has changed the business environment and also resulted in increased awareness of the consumers and demand for higher standards of social responsibility. The companies brand strategies has gain in importance in order to strengthen their brands. A part of a company's CSR, CRM, cause-related marketing, which is a relatively new marketing strategy and created when companies choose to partner with charities and market it. Garment/clothing industry has as many others come to be shaped by the effects of globalization, but has also endured heavy criticism over the years. This criticism is largely because of the outside world's reaction to the exploitation of developing countries.

Our common future involves many important challenges. People and nature need to improve the relationship in order to reach an ecologically sustainable development. In a society where consumption of products steadily increases, the consumer awareness about social and environmental issues connected to the products becomes an importent factor. More and more companies choose to work more actively with these issues and more and more products get labelled by some of the eco labelling organisations. From the cradle to the gate means that a study has been done on a part of a products life cycle.

Along with the increasing trend of online advertising comes an increasing avoidance behaviour from the observers. The marketing communication now requires a valuable content, which leads to the creation of new online advertising forms; including content marketing, advertorials, online ads and the latest rising star - Native Advertising. The last-mentioned also constitutes the basis and object of study for this paper. The purpose of this study is to shed light into this relatively unexplored topic and concretize the true effects. There are many examples of how Native Advertising is framed and implemented, but little hard facts and real figures.

When the Iron spirals investigated in this paper saw the light again no one looked at them as nothing more than decoration. It was first during the 2011 excavation in Old Uppsala that the symbolism of the items no longer could be ignored. The spirals of Old Uppsala lay along the walls of the great hall, which stood upon one of the human constructed plateaus in the area. The hall had been burned down and then cleared of all lumber. Then the iron spirals had been placed in the positions and then everything was sealed with a layer of clay.A study of the artifact began with the purpose to contextualize and interpret the iron spiral.

Purpose:Only 60 percent of the newly started companies survive their three first years. The purpose of this report is to obtain a deeper understanding regarding how newly started companies work with their positioning and if there are some kind of a relationship between positioning and the survival rate of newly started companies.Research questions:Do newly started companies know what position is? Do they incorporate positioning in their day to day marketing?Approach:We have used a hypothetical-deductive way of reasoning and a qualitative study to gather the information needed. We have through interviews asked our questions to six newly started companies in three different cities.Findings:In our essay, we reached the conclusion that newly started companies do not spend sufficient time or energy on positioning their products. The companies interviewed only market their product as a good product.

We were accepted to the field study Dignity and therefore chose to write our thesis in connection with it. Our subject is the oasis of Siwa in Egypt. The society has long been isolated, and therefore, the city has been able to preserve their handicraft methods and values. We chose to study the Ecological and Handicraft Development Center, which is a newly opened center for craft production. We wanted to see how the centre could use storytelling as a marketing strategy.

In recent years e-commerce has experienced a big increase in usage. Internet however, cannot offer the same level of personal contact as traditional shops can.E-commerce is characterized by impersonal and standardized web shops that do not stimulate any emotional connection between the customer and the company. Without this personal contact with the customer the possibilities for the company to stimulate loyalty decreases. Loyalty however, is as important in e-commerce as it is in traditional commerce. The authors of this paper chose the following problem for the study:What marketing strategies are fortunate for e-commerce companies to use to create loyal customers?To research this subject the authors saw it fit to combine qualitative and quantitative research methods.

In this essay I want to investigate how the poodle strategy affects a person?s credibility when he or she uses it. The poodle strategy is a strategy, which someone uses when he or she is scrutinized by the media. It?s primary purpose is to suppress further media coverage but it is also a strategy for defending oneself and hence rescuing one?s reputation either as a private person or as an official.The essay?s research questions are:How has the strategy been applied for defensive purposes and what are the results?To which extent can the Stasis theory and Benoit?s theory on Apologia be connected to the strategy?Does the strategy affect the user?s credibility?To answer these questions four cases from the political sphere in Sweden where persons have been said to have ?done a poodle? have been analyzed.

Due to the harsh competition among Swedish food retailers, in-store marketing is a crucial component in the stores marketing strategy. In an attempt to differentiate among its competitors, COOP Sweden has begun to use concave store shelves. Although the food retailing industry is one of the most studied, no research has been conducted on the concave store shelves. The objective of this study is to describe how these shelves effect the customer perception of the assortment, their experience of the store environment and their buying behavior. An S-O-R framework is used as an overall basis in order to outline the effects investigated in this paper.

The evolution of the media landscape and the introduction of social media have increased thenumber of communication channels tremendously during the last decade. These new channels have also made an impact on the information control, which has shifted focus from organisations to consumers. In order to communicate one coherent image in the numerous existing channels, organisations need to create strategies that take this into account and makes sure the same messages are communicated through all channels. One way to do this is to use integrated marketing communication (IMC). Since the social media is a relatively new phenomenon, there is no clear way of how to include social media into an IMC strategy.