Background: Knowledge of customer needs is a key factor in companies? struggle to develop successful products. Several studies illustrate that the main reason for failure in product development is lack of customer understanding. Lately considerable changes have occurred. Large-scale mass production is continuously being replaced by customer orientation, especially in the high technological market.

New innovation and technology have influenced the development of product development processes and the four largest banks in Sweden have more or less been forced to adapt their products and services along new customer requirements. It may therefore be considered appropriate to involve customers in this process. This by collecting customer information and allow customers to influence the process to a greater extent. The payment solutions of Sweden?s largest banks' continue to evolve and to pay with electronic money has come to change banks' product development processes of payment solutions.

Society has seen a tremendous increase in threats, violence and especially unprovoked violence perpetrated by youths. Violence and more seriously unprovoked violence has become a major problem for many service corporations as it gives them bad image and reputation. Corporate Social Responsibility CSR encourages many companies to engage in social activities as they realize that the company is part of the society and the environment. What affects society may sooner or later affect the corporate. For any business to prosper and create a long-term relationship with its customers, it needs a safe environment both for the customers and staff.Feedback from customers and staff is survival and these two (customer and staff) are the most vital assets any firm could have.

This paper examines the customer relationships of a telecom operator and how their customer accounting is done. The aim is to use the framework developed by Lind & Strömsten (2006) to categorize customer relationships and see to what extent the framework predicts which type of customer accounting method is used for each customer relationship. A case study was made at Telenor Sverige AB where different customer relationships are identified and linked to the customer accounting techniques that are used for financial measurement of the customers. Findings include that all but one of the customer relationships described in the framework were recognized at Telenor and that most customer accounting techniques mentioned in the framework were in fact used and associated with different customer relationships. The results of the case study also highlight that some differences exist between the predictions of the framework and the observations at Telenor..

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.

This paper is a degree project on the C-level, 15 points at University West, Department of Business and IT dept. Informatics. This study is about agile methodology and its impact on IT projects. Requirements management is a process within an IT project, where customer has certain requirements that must be met by an IT system. The difference between the traditional and agile development is in the requirements management process and it can cause problems in a project.

Swedish consulting companies within the architecture-and engineering business exist on a market that is distinguished by an increasing globalization and internationalization. The companies? commissions are based mostly on long-term, personal clientele. These relations are threatened by a huge number of coming retirements and high employee turnover.Consequently these companies need to improve and strengthen their relationships with existing customers, to create long-term employee and customer loyalty. The purpose of this essay was to analyze and evaluate consulting companies´ internal marketing.

The manufacturing industry is currently in a short-term downturn while the competition is increasing. The result of this is that companies must find new ways to bring out their products. Traditional competitive strategies, such as low pricing, is not sufficient today as the customer is inquiring something more than just a good product. Higher demands are presented on an accurate, well functional, communication between customer and companies, as this has become an important strategic factor in achieving long-term profitability.The aim of this independent project was to analyze and evaluate the communication process between a company and its sales companies.In order to illustrate this process, a case study was carried out at Alfa Laval, their sales companies and employees at their distribution center in Tumba. In order to see the differences in attitudes between the management, the sales companies and the employees regarding communication and involvement a gap analysis were used.The theoretical part of the study considers theories about business mission, communication, involvement, quality and creating value.The result showed that a smaller gap exists between the sales companies and the management while a slightly larger one exists between the employees and the management.

Research on the power of Customer involvement, and in particular recommendation is very resourceful. Many studies have mapped the reasons for why customers are willing to recommend, however they often ignore potential differences among brands and how that may affect these reasons. This study is built on a quantitative survey investigating how consumers interact with brands, depending on category affiliation. The categories used were Bhat and Reddy's symbolic and functional, consisting of three brands respectively where each brand represented a different product type.The evolvement of social media has also transformed the platform of recommendation from physical to virtual and changed the way people connect. Thus, taking the investigation further, potential differences between symbolic and functional brands was tested in different social media platforms.

Since companies have realised the importance of customer loyalty and since the service sector has gained higher significance in recent years, we found it interesting to study what leads to customer loyalty in service companies. The theories we have chosen to consider are customer loyalty, service quality, service guarantees, affinity marketing, loyalty programmes and customer clubs, the customer in focus and other factors that influences customer loyalty. To find out how service companies are working with cus- tomer loyalty, we have conducted a case study within three service companies. Our findings are that customer loyalty has a significant importance for the companies we studied. Quality and personnel were the factors we found had the greatest impact in service companies concerning customer loyalty.

Marketers of today are confronted by the fact that it is increasingly difficult to gain the customer's attention, as they first have to break through the ad clutter. In a landscape where the general attitude towards advertising is negative, one way to successfully deliver the message to the customer involves communicating through personal impact. By using stimuli containing identical information with different senders, this thesis seeks to quantitatively explore whether brands can make use of the personal networks of its employees, in their social media marketing strategy. The purpose of the study is to investigate if communication via the employees could enhance traditional communication effects, such as buying intention and electronic WOM intention. Furthermore, the study aims to examine which role the employee should hold when communicating on behalf of the brand, and if the communication effects vary with the degree of product involvement.

Research has concluded that meaningless differentiation with trivial attributes sometimes can be a successful strategy. However, the effect varies with respect to certain aspects such as the price of the product and the decision context. How the characteristics of the consumer influence the effect of trivial attributes has until now been unknown. This thesis investigates how the consumer?s level of knowledge and personal involvement influence the effects of trivial attributes on product preferences and product attitudes.

The structures of organizations have gone through a dramatic change over the last years; as a result customer service is no longer a small side activity but a critical part in customer relationship management. Development in information technology has created opportunities as well as challenges for organizations when it comes to providing a customer service with capacity of sensing and responding to customers' needs. Previous research shows a relationship between customer response capability and customer knowledge processeses, this study investigates and confirms this relationship. However, findings show that dedication and understanding for customers needs has a direct impact on both customer response capability and customer knowledge processeses, this result indicates that customer knowledge processes and customer relationship management are difficult to differentiate. Furthermore, this study explores IT-related resources impact on customer response capability and customer knowledge processes.

The aim of this thesis is to describe how service companies through adjustment of the customer?s zone of tolerance can influence customer?s perception of the service during the processes of service delivery and create customer satisfaction. The method used was case study approach utilizing personal interviews, which were conducted at two service companies. The study showed that the aspects of the service that have greatest importance for the customer?s assessment of the service and customer satisfaction among others are personal treatment and that personel behave in the way that makes the customer feel itself taken good care of and unique.

This thesis studies the customer relationships and customer accounting methods used by a Swedish fashion company. The aim is to test the empirical applicability of the relationship based framework developed by Lind and Strömsten and to explain potential differences between empirical observations and theory. The framework is based on the categorization of four customer relationship groups and the appropriate customer accounting methods to be used for each relationship. The fashion company, that recently assessed the profitability of its customer base in an aim to implement a new customer strategy, is the object of the qualitative case study. The case study reveals that all customer relationships are to be found at Whyred, except the connective customer relationship.