Direct marketing is an area within marketing that is growing rapidly. Many companies has realised the benefits of using direct marketing, such as receiving direct response from customers and gaining a better customer relation. The growth within direct marketing means that traditional mass marketing today face harder competition than ever. This thesis examines and look in to three well recognised Swedish companies use of direct marketing. Our main purpose is to establish how companies spend their marketing budget between direct marketing and traditional marketing activities.

It is important to understand the process of appraisal of a business in order to establish its value. The purpose of our thesis is to establish which methods and models are used when evaluating a business and investigate the factors that may affect the value and price tag of a business. We have used a qualitative approach by conducting both indepth interviews and a survey as well as reading literature within the field. The main conslusion in our findings is that the common practice of discounted cash flow is widely used when bestowing a monetary value for a business, and in order to raise the value a well established customer relationship was the single most important factor. As far as lowering the value, the answers were of such a wide spread that a single factor could not be attributed.

In this thesis, the impact of collective ratings on customers? perception of a product is examined. The empirical data comes from an experimentally designed survey where the effect of collective ratings is measured in the setting of a traditional advertisement for a feature film. In contrast to what previous research would suggest be to the expected outcome, the authors of this paper concludes that in comparison with alternative designs of advertisements, there are no measurable advantages of including collective ratings in advertisements from the marketers point of view. We find two explanations to the result: (1) people tend to self-report that they are more influenced by collective ratings than they actually are, and (2) the advertisement which lacked a rating could be as attractive due to cultural interpretations of white spaces..

The goal of this paper is to provide a model for a sustainable electricity system to an island, in the Pacific Ocean near the equator.The method which has been used is to model supply and demand of electricity in the computer program Stella, through the creation of a dynamic system that balances them against each other. The result from the model will then be used to calculate the electricity price per kWh for the island.The result of the work is that electricity from solar energy is comparable with electricity produced from oil, if the oil pays for all its external costs, and the potential for pumped hydro storage plants is located. It also requires that consumers of electricity can be their own producers to avoid the expenditure of tax and reducing the cost of distribution. But since oil is a finite resource and has had a rising cost in recent years, while solar energy has had a declining cost, perhaps this will be a more competitive solution in the future.

The aim of this paper is to describe how to measure welfare effect of the deregulation and increased competition of the public transport by railway in Sweden. The paper also includes a numerical example of how to measure the welfare effect. In our study we use public data from SJ regaring quantity and ticket prices for the period 1996 - 2005. We have used equivalent variation, EV, as the method to measure the welfare effect. We demonstrate how to derive the equation to calculate EV by starting with a Marschallian demand function.

In recent years, increasing emphasis has been placed on streamlining the supply chain. Keeping inventory and warehouses is considered to be a waste of resources. It is however difficult to completely eliminate the need for inventory and warehouses in a supply chain. The purpose of warehousing is to provide a service for the customer. By keeping what the Customer demands in inventory it is possible to make a quick delivery when a need arises.

Studiens syfte är att utveckla storbankernas Retail Banking verksamheter genom att studera detaljhandeln, de nya bankaktörerna och storbankerna. Det empiriska materialet baseras på åtta semistrukturerade intervjuer med chefer inom bank- och detaljhandelsbranschen Studien konstaterar att storbankerna måste utveckla sina Retail Banking verksamheter för att bemöta konkurrensen från andra bankaktörer. Genom förbättrade CRM-system, bättre nyttjande av distributionskanaler och mer försäljningsinriktade organisationer är storbankerna redo för framtidens Retail Banking..

In this thesis we have examined why the establishment process of travel destination is essential for the tour operators and how the process can be influenced by different conditions. The thesis is written from the perspective of the tour operators and with the tour operator Ving as our case study, we have been able to create a picture of how the establishment process of travel destination may look like.We have chosen to deal with some different areas in this thesis that all are important for the creation of a holistic picture of the process. The overall segments listed in this thesis are the process itself, the tourist, marketing, the product creation and demand. By connecting our theoretical framework to the collected empirical data from our case study, we have analyzed the establishment process and drawn our conclusions..

I dagens samhälle kretsar shopping inte bara kring själva produkterna som säljs, utan även om hur butiksmiljön är uppbyggd. Den visuella miljön och hur produkter presenteras har stor påverkan på kunders beteende och inköp. Ljus, ljud och färger påverkar våra sinnen både positivt och negativt, vilket butiker utnyttjar på olika sätt. Syftet med detta uppsatsarbete är att beskriva vad unga kunder (18-25 år) anser ska ingå i ett attraktivt och starkt butikskoncept. Syftet är också att undersöka hur unga kunder upplever likheter respektive skillnader gällande butikskoncept för butikskedjor och produktutvecklande varumärkesleverantörer.

After the deregulation of the Swedish pharmacy market customers can be lost due to stock-outs. Optimization of pharmacy inventory levels has thus become increasingly important. To minimize inventory costs while considering the cost of shortages the latter must be estimated. However, the shortage cost is very difficult to compute. Thus, the aim of this paper is to estimate the pharmacy-specific shortage cost parameter and its relation to other inventory costs.

The purpose of this study has been to investigate advantages and problems with distributionsystem metering in substations. This report is a study in cooperation with Göteborg Energi.The analyses in this report are made for GENAB, a subsidiary company of Göteborg Energi.To analyse advantages and problems in advance is interesting information for GENAB. Theresult of the report could be based upon whether installation of metering in distributionsubstations will be implemented and in that case which kind of measurement that is relevant.The most relevant and strategic place to implement measurement is at the distributionsubstations on the secondary side (400V), this is due to the placement of the currenttransformers. The measurements in this study involve current, voltage, power, power factor,temperature, energy and power quality.Measuring instruments that are relevant to implement are intended to measure current,voltage, power, power factor, energy and, possibly, power quality in the same measuring unit.It is desirable to have a measuring instrument that measures both energy and power qualitybut since it is most often a cost question, it can be established that energy meters have a lowercost.Metering in distribution substations gives a better illustration of the power network. Thisresults in many advantages for GENAB.

Background: Once upon a time the most important resources in an economy were tangible goods. Historically, Swedish company culture has been dominated by engineering and techni-cal innovation has been the focal point. Today, Intangible values drive product development and form a company?s differentiation. Intangibles have therefore become the most prominent resources in a company.

How does the weather protection systems look like today, and how will they be developed in the future? These are questions that we have worked with during this project. At the start of our report there?s a summary of the leading weather protection manufacturers in Sweden. We have explained how these systems are constructed and how they work.

Due to excess precipitation that cause runoff, all soils in Sweden naturally leaches nitrogen.High leaching from arable land is an environmental problem when the runoff reacheswaters. In the international agreement, Baltic Sea Action Plan, the aim is to reduce therunoff of nutrients. Sweden has agreed to reduce its load of e.g. nitrogen to the Baltic Sea.One of the proposed measures is an increased use of site-specific N-fertilization, which hasbeen shown to increase nitrogen use efficiency and therefore also reduce the nitrogen runoff.Either yields are increased with the same total amount of nitrogen, or the total quantityof nitrogen is reduced with preserved yield levels, which is profitable for the farmers.The dynamics of nitrogen leaching differs between top dressing applications above orbelow the economical optimum. There is a consensus about a difference in the dynamics,but not about its magnitude.

The aim of this thesis is to get an idea of how service companies set their prices. The method used was a case study approach, which was conducted at three real estate companies. The study showed that when setting their prices, the main aspect is their own costs. However, we have found that several other aspects play a big role when setting prices on services in real estate business such as individual customer behaviour and market competition. We have also found that the real estate companies charge very similar prices.