The study examines selectivity of the customer base and scarcity of a product?s effect on attitude and value towards a product or service. A questionnaire study is made from three different situations. The result varied depending on the situation; however it was found that selectivity of the customer base and scarcity has a great impact on the attitude and the perceived value towards a product or service. Selectivity of the customer base was found having the highest level of impact on both attitude and perceived value.

Small!size!enterprises!within!the!outdoor!industry!seldom!use!a!structured!process!or!method!when!involving!users!in!product!development.!One!reason!for!this!is!that!many!structured!development!processes!are!designed!for!large!companies!with!very!different!resources.!When!involving!users!in!product!development!processes,!the!most!common!user! is! an! elite! athlete.! She! or! he! often! has! different! requirements! than! the! regular!consumer!and!in!the!customers?!point!of!view;!this!leads!to!nonCmaximized!developed!products.!!The! result! of! this! thesis! is! a! user! involvement! process! for! small! outdoor! companies!based! on! the! Sister! Kenny! Research! Center! Innovation! Handbook,! a! product!development!process,!which!itself!is!based!on!a!phaseCgate!model.!The!process!focuses!on!the!user!category!enthusiastic!amateurs,!since!this!is!what!companies!in!the!industry!require.!The!process!also! focuses!on!how!and!where! small!outdoor! companies! should!involve!users!and!give!recommendations!on!how!many!users!that!should!be!involved!in!a! product! development! process,! different! from! what! the! theory! recommend.! The!process! also! builds! on! that! ideas! should! come! from! the! users! first,! and! then! being!further!developed!by!the!company's!product!developers.!The!degree!of!communication!between!users!and!the!company!is!shown!and!the!report!clarifies!the!user!involvement!intensity!in!product!development!processes.!!The!involvement!process!that!has!been!developed!has!also!been!summarized!in!a!guide!that! can!be!used!by! a! company!on! a!daily!basis.!This! contains! information!on,! among!other!things,!how!users!are!selected!and!how!to!plan!a!workshop.!!! !.

The purpose of this essay was to find conceivable marketing- and business strategies that can be combined with a company?s lifestyle.This essay is dependent on a number of interviews with the owner of a maternity clothing trademark, PROUD. PROUD is a new company that has many different options concerning expansion, trademark and its existing and future products and also the knowledge regarding the client?s attitude towards PROUD.The authors of this essay believe that the trademark should represent a lifestyle. For a company to be able to deliver, it has to understand what the future clients want and need.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to create an understanding of how customer engagement, communication / interaction and customer insight are driving forces behind the use of Social CRM from a leadership perspective.Method: The purpose of the study, we believed it was appropriate to use a qualitative approach to conduct the study. The empirical data were collected through semi-structured interviews. The sample consisted of 10 companies located in the Gävle area who are active on social media. The interviews were coded to obtain keywords and patterns. These patterns and keywords are then analyzed to arrive at the study's results.Results and contributions: Our results suggest that all the identified benefits, customer engagement, customer insight and communication are driving forces to make use of social CRM.

In most software engineering project, users are only involved in the beginning of the project as a help to design the requirements specification but users can be involved after this phase too, but is it effective to do so? With this report we would like to investigate how effective it is to involve users after the requirements specification has been written and approved. To find out how effective it is to involve the users we try some fast and simple involvement techniques on a quite far gone project. These techniques include ethnographic studies, prototypes and surveys. We also interviewed a couple of people who work with usability and finally delivered a report with our results to them to find out if they found our result relevant.

Real estate agent is a popular occupation that many young people study today. They enter the market and will have to compete with experienced real estat agents. Why should the customer choose them instead of those with more experience? We describe the character of services offered, expectations and customer satisfaction. We have chosen to give a questionnaire to customers and real estat agents.

Title: Strategies for competition ? a study of the Swedish contact lenses market.Authors: Pernilla AArskog and Annika Lange.Background: As a market gets more mature and the competition increases, it is more important for a company to apply the right strategic perspective. There are four fundamental strategic perspectives for a service-oriented business: a core product-, a price-, an image- and a service perspective. This study is a about service management and take its point from the theories from the Nordic School about strategies for competition, customer value, perceived customer quality and customer loyalty.Purpose: The main purpose with this study is to analyze and evaluate how the actors at the Swedish market of contact lenses should compete to gain further competitive advantages.Method: The study includes four qualitative interviews with two traditional opticians and two Internet based businesses, but also a survey with 106 contact lens users is included.Analysis: In the analyse part of this thesis it was concluded that the traditional opticians conception about their customer not agrees with what the customer evaluate as important. Many of the customers have thought about changing their optician, and besides that do not recommend their optician, and can there for not be categorize as loyal customers.

The theory of ?security communities? is generally understood as ?dependable expectations of peaceful change? between groups and whether or not the African Union can be said to meet that criteria has been contested in the research community. One of the central disagreements lie in the nature of the region?s conflicts, of which a majority are intrastate but with tendencies of transnational involvement. This paper seeks to understand how extensive this involvement is and how it affects the possibility of classifying the African Union as a security community.

The purpose of this thesis is to describe and analyze how the mining equipment producers on a global market manage to handle the changing conditions concerning customer value. Our approach has been a comparative analysis between two different sites in order to answer the purpose. The case studies at Metso Mining have been made through interviews and visits at two geographical markets, South America and Scandinavia. The theoretical framework applied on our empirical findings is based on Blue Ocean Strategy, Customer Value and Resourced Based View. The empirical foundation is based on interviews with Metso Mining employees at Sorocaba in Brazil and Kiruna/Gällivare, Trelleborg and Staffanstorp in Sweden.

The purpose of this study is to analyze how customer oriented businesses can use loyalty programs to create loyalty and how loyalty can be increased. We have in this study chosen to refer loyalty program to the loyalty program that belong to the company Jula AB. Our study is written in a qualitative method. In our method, we chose to interview people in Jula organization to get a business perspective to our study. We have also chosen to assemble a focus group of Jula-club members to also get a customer perspective on the subject.

Customer service has traditionally consisted of telephone, mail, and later on chat.But the entry of social media has changed the way companies exercise customerservice. Companies should ask themselves whether the same type of traditionalcommunication may or may not function in a new channel and thus whether itcan be applied to social media.The purpose of this study is to describe the companies? use of customer servicein social media and how the communication differentiates from thecommunication in traditional customer service, and also to define the effect onthe customers? relationship to the company. To reach our conclusions we havecombined theoretical references with qualitative interviews.By our analysis, we found that the communication in social media expandsthe possibilities. By entering an unfamiliar channel, customer service has hadto adapt themselves and their language.

The increased specialisation and complexity in products and services has created the need for Swedish companies to focus more on their core businesses. This has resulted in them opting to buy services and products that lie outside of their core business from consultancy businesses or other types of suppliers. When companies describe their offers in internal and external marketing it is done often in terms of company or service attributes that are not based on customer value or offered value for the customer. The reason for this is that companies have not adapted their services to the different needs of their customers. As a result of this, they run the risk of offering the same services as their competitors and communicate values that the customers either do not understand or experience as value adding.

The Swedish retail business has been characterized by a small number of ruling distributors. These distributors have been affected negatively by the internationalization which has made it possible for international distributors to establish their stores in the Swedish market. These international distributors are focused on low price stores. Their establishment on the Swedish market has led to a decrease in market shares for the Swedish distributors, which has damaged their profitability. Another change that has affected the Swedish distributors is that the behavior and needs of the customers has changed.

Background: The fierce competetivness that characterize todays market force the companies to differentiate their offerings to a greater extent. The customers do no longer choose their supplier on the attributes of the products alone. Their purchase decisions also depend on the relationship the customers have with their supplier. With new customer channels like the Internet and advanced computer systems companies can increase the value for their customers through a better understanding of the customers needs and preferences. In this way companies can create longterm relationships with their customers.

Several studies have examined the effects of perceived justice of preferential treatments to customers, but few have studied these effects when customers have different input. The purpose of the study is therefore to enhance the knowledge and understanding of the effects of preferential treatments to customers with varying input. More specifically, the study focuses on how perceived justice, customer satisfaction and loyalty are affected depending on the customer's input and received treatment. An experimental study with 263 respondents showed that the perceived justice and loyalty intentions among both the receiver and the non-receiver of the preferential treatment were of highest level when it was given to a customer with large input. Customer satisfaction however, was found to be of highest level when customers themselves received preferential treatment, regardless of the size of their input.