Background: It is today common for companies to provide some sort of incentive for CEO's and senior management positions to motivate, retain and benefit employees within a company. This is in order to drive the goals of the CEO and management in the direction that is desired by the owner. Currently, the Swedish centre-right government has forbidden the use of such variable pay within state-owned companies. There are two different attitudes to variable pay, one that is in favour and one that rejects it. However most people agree on the fact that a well-functioning incentive scheme can be of great strategic importance for a company.Approach: has variable pay to CEO's had any effect on the company's profitability.Aim: the aim of the study is to compare companies who use variable pay to CEO's with companies that do not in relation to their profitability in terms of profit margins, yearly performance, returns on total capital and returns on equity.Method: the study uses a quantitative approach.

The purpose of this thesis is to see how small differences in a store can affect the customer behavior. The changes consist of auditory and visual sensory cues. Since many companies today makes a lot of changes in their styling element, but without knowing how it really affects the customer behavior we thought it would be interesting to see by doing an experiment at IKEA. The study is therefore based on a quantitative research method, where theories have been described and from which hypotheses have been derived to test the theories. The experience took place at IKEA during two weeks where 5732 observations were made.The result from the experiment is that the sensory cue sight makes individuals spend more time in the environment but not creating attention.

Multi-brand portfolios are characterized by comprising many brands in the same product category. Companies that have chosen to organize their products according to this strategy are facing both possibilities, such as expanding the accessible market size, and challenges such as how to organize the brands, their individual roles and their relation and position to the other brands in the category to maximize revenues. To address these aspects of multi-brand portfolios, I have investigated four product categories where multiple brands are represented at Mölnlycke Health Care, Unilever, Fagerhult and L?Oréal; how the multi-brand portfolios are organized, how the segmentation, positioning and product differentiation are done and what advantages and disadvantages that are associated with this strategy. My conclusions are that multi-brand portfolios can be organized in many different ways and to become successful, they have to be set in relation to the company?s whole brand architecture.

Background: Previous studies focused on customer loyalty and customer satisfaction. But no studies focused on the interaction between the financial advisor and their client. Therefore we have chosen to focus on this knowledge gap.Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to illustrate how the interaction between financial advisors and customers affect financial advisory in investment decision making.Method: The thesis philosophy was positivistic because patterns were found with help of a survey. Furthermore is the paper quantitative since the thesis is measurable and it try to explain the interaction between the financial advisors and the clients demographic characteristics and how it influence the financial advice Conclusion: The theories thin-slicing and similarity attraction paradigm may not apply to the interaction between financial advisor and client..

This master thesis work was done by two students at Machine Design at KTH for Lesjöfors Stockholmsfjäder AB. The task was to develop a calculation program for gas springs. The program is going to ease the selection of gas springs for a given case of a lid that should be opened. The program is going to be used internal by sales people at Lesjöfors AB in Sweden and internationally. The program is therefore written in English.The program was developed in Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition.

The purpose of this report is to come up with possible improvement suggestions to the distribution central at Götene Stål & Verktygs AB (GSV). GSV is a wholesale dealer located in Götene. The company doesn?t produce anything it self, it buys in products and sells them to customers.The distribution central at GSV is the place where the products comes in and gets ready to deliver.To come up with possible improvement suggestions we started with process mapping over the main process and the distribution centre process. The main process here is from the point where the customer gives GSV an order to the point where GSV deliver the order.Our result shows that the major problem in the distribution central at GSV is the big volume differences in the incoming goods.

ProblemThe manufacturing industry is a mature industry where the profit margins are small and the competition is hard. This makes it hard for both manufacturers and resellers to gain market shares and reach reasonable profit margins only by selling products. Therefore Swecon who is reseller for Volvo Construction Equipment tries to find alternative methods and ways to increase their profit. An alternative source of income could be to develop the range of services that are connected to the ground products.PurposeThe purpose of the thesis is to examine how Swecon in southern Sweden can improve their offers of existing services connected to the ground product and investigate the demand of new such services.MethodThis study is based on a qualitative study of five of Swecons local offices and five of Swecons customers. The empirical framework is mostly based on personal interviews but in some cases information was retrieved by using phone interviews.

Wind power is one of the sources of renewable energy which has to be developed further in order to lessen our dependence on non renewable sources of energy. It's mainly oil and coal which have to be replaced by green energy. Wind power is already established in many countries, for example Germany, The United States of America and Denmark but it has to be continually developed and expanded to meet the needs of the growing energy consumption in the world. During the last few years many types of small wind turbines have appeared on the market. These small wind turbines are an alternative to the big wind turbines or power generators which demand huge sums of investment money.A new target group can now buy the small wind turbines in order to cover their own usage of electricity.

All inclusive travel has become a popular way to travel abroad. When tourists pay for everything in advance their need for contact with the local people will be reduced. The consequences of this can be dissatisfaction from the local people as they are left out and do not share the financial benefits created by tourism. During the purchasing cycle of an all inclusive travel, it is possible that the tour operator can influence a sustainable development.The aim of this paper is to compare how a large and a small tour operator in their purchase of all inclusive holidays interacts with local players to create sustainable development, thereby creating a surplus value to the customer. The hypothesis is that the amount of knowledge and application of this knowledge regarding sustainable development differs in the purchase process between large and small tour operators.This paper was carried out as a case study.

The main purpose of this bachelor thesis is to create a product in the form of a database that can be used for cost estimates of equipment within bio refineries. Through interviews and literature searches the key components and their costs were identified. The database was constructed in Microsoft Excel with different tabs for different categories of components; these tabs are further divided into three parts: one part with costs, one part with calculations and an information part. Most of the part with costs contains the expenses found in scientific papers during the literature study, the calculating part converts different capacities according to user preferences and the currency to euro (?) from 2010 and the information part consists of references and information about what is included in the cost.The database is a good tool for making cost estimates for bio refineries.

The overriding purpose of this graduate thesis is to evaluate if municipalities and county councils can deviate from the legislation of public procurement during procurement of customer choice agreements within the health and social care area. The intention of this Quasi-market is to provide the users with competition in terms of quality rather then the general principal rule of economic value.My conclusion results in a legal situation without rules of general procedure. So far the authorities make their own regulation in the field of customer choice agreements. The problem lies within the authorization of new contractors and their right to make an appeal against resolutions made by the authorities social care divisions.One solution is to legislate within the present law of public procurement. Another way to solve the problem is to create a lex specialis apart from the present public procurement regulation..

The aim of this thesis is to analyse and if possible improve the communication, mainly seen from a pedagogical perspective, between the IT company (Nostratic) and their clients in a first meeting. The analysis covers the preparation part, communication during the meetings, the technical terminology used during the meetings as well as the follow up of the meetings. Due to the lack of research within this area and the lack of personal experience on my part, the conducted study has been explorative with the use of qualitative methods. Although my first aim was to put emphisis on the pedagogical part of the communication, I found while conducting the study that there were other areas of higher importance to analyse in order to improve the customer meetings. Unfortunately the company went bankrupt in the middle of my study which resulted in me not beeing able to try out the potential improvements.

Purpose: To find out in what ways signs of healthier varieties in store, affect and possible change, customer behaviour. Methodology: The study has a positivistic view on the world. The research is conducted by an abductive approach using theory and empirical data alternately. Both quantitative and qualitative methods have been adopted in order to see changes in customer behaviour as well as explain it. Theoretical perspective: The study is based upon theories in the areas of customer behaviour (buying behaviour and decision making) and the store environment that could affect that behaviour (total merchandise process and point of purchase communication).

The competitiveness and profitability of swedish farm enterprises is frequently discussed in agricultural media. Increased exposure to the surrounding world with greater competitive pressure and considerable price fluctuations in the agricultural markets demand new ways of acting to secure the agricultural sector?s long-term survival and profitability. Structural change and/or diversification leads to increased numbers of stake-holders around the farm enterprise and thereby also the expectations of the farmers ability to lead and coordinate resources. Lean is the name of a management model developed by Toyota, influenced by the lack of resources in Japan during the post WWII period.

The aim of this thesis is to describe the customer?s attitudes toward the contracting for availability, i.e., which factors are from the customer?s perspective necessary for the fulfilment of a supplier-customer agreement? Furthermore, the objective is to describe and analyse a supplier-customer relation in the Defence Industrial sphere.The present study has been carried out as a case study using an abductive approach. The thesis is based on a practical problem, i.e. which factors will be important to the customer when a contractor in the Defence Industry wants to increase its commitment of service, and how will their relationship change? The thesis is above all focused on generating knowledge that can lead to rapid and concrete measures and that can be used in the analysis of an increased industrial commitment but also as a case study of a problem of a more general nature in the Defence Industry.