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.

En produkt lever inte för alltid. Behovet av ständig förnyelse försvinner aldrig. Många produkter misslyckas på grund av att säljaren inte förstår målmarknadens köpbeteende. Syftet med denna uppsats var att skapa en förståelse för vad som påverkar företags vilja att köpa nya produkter. För att nå detta syfte skickade vi ut 200 enkäter till utvalda företag i Sverige.

The increasing complexity in the development of a configurable real-time system has emerged new principles of software techniques, such as aspect-oriented software development and component-based software development. These techniques allow encapsulation of the system's crosscutting concerns and increase the modularity of the software. The properties of a component that influences the systems performance or semantics are specified separately in entities called aspects, while basic functionality of the property still remains in the component. When building a real-time system, different sets of configurations of aspects and components can be combined, resulting in different configurations of the system. The temporal behavior of the system changes and a way to ensure the predictability of the system is needed.

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.

The aim of this study was to develop a load prognosis model for Uppsala district heating system to be used as a tool for heat production optimization. The methodwas to build three models for the different customer types; housing, industry andoffices and then scale them for the total system using data from Uppsala districtheating system. The heat load consists of two parts, one that is temperaturedependent and one that is dependent of the social behavior of the customers. Thetemperature part was modelled with an ARX model using an outdoor temperatureprognosis as input signal. The social behavior part was modelled using the mean ofthe social behavior from some days before and additionally by distinguishing betweenweekdays and weekends.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the two new phenomena; the pricing model Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW) and the launch of daily newspapers in the iPad. A quantitative study was conducted in order to examine what would happen if the PWYW-model where to be used by a daily newspaper for its iPad product, and what this would signal to consumers about the brand in terms of brand association and brand attitude. Furthermore, we have investigated which of these factors that are affecting willingness to pay in this PWYW-situation. Moreover, a secondary purpose was to test the two possible presentations of the digital newspaper in the iPad; Product and Access ? and how the results differed between these two.

There is a tough competition in food-stores these days. Storeowners have been forced to try something new to attract customers. One way to accomplish that is to add private labels to the assortment. There are several benefits with these labels; its higher margins for this type of brand and the brand can also strengthen the stores image in the customers mind. When private labels first entered the market, the customer had a relatively low attitude towards the brands.

For a company to survive it has to make a profit. To make a profit transactions are necessary and to achieve this a company can choose to focus on creating loyal customers. Loyal customers can contribute to secured revenues, increased market shares and reduced marketing costs. Research within customer loyalty has mainly focused on different types of loyalty and the impact it has on customers behavior. However, there is a lack of research concerning which factors that create loyal customers.

When patrolling grocery stores, customers engage in a purchase situation where they face great amounts of information, whereof price is one. This paper intends to shed light on the price information search behavior that customer's exhibit before choosing their products in grocery stores. In order to do so two studies have been conducted, one quantitative and one qualitative, to assemble the data needed to provide statistically significant results. The objective of the quantitative study is to gather data on customer's external price information search, and it is based on the most recent eye-tracking technology. The second qualitative study is complementary and based on interviews with randomly chosen customers that have responded to several questions regarding their price information search, shopping knowledge and experiences.

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.

This essay is focused on the phenomena of self-injurious behavior of two young men. The purpose of the essay is to enlighten their experiences of their earlier self-injurious behavior, and to further enlighten which factors they believe have been contributed to the origin and the ending of the behavior. The research questions the essay raises are: Which factors has contributed to the origin of the self-injurious behavior? Which functions did the self-injurious behavior have for the young men? What made the two young men quit their self-injurious behavior? The essay is qualitative and do not imply to generalize the results and it is made from interviews with respondents and earlier research on self-injurious behavior. The results show that there are differences in the factors that origin of the self-injurious behavior between the respondents.

This study examines the eWOM effect, more specifically: how customer reviews effects consumers. The study is based on a modified version of the Regulatory Focus Theory which describes consumer behavior using consumer consumption goals. The purpose of this study was to examine how positive and negative customer review's influence consumers when analyzing products that are equally characterized by two consumption goals: promotion and prevention goals. The authors combined quantitative (questionnaire) and qualitative (focus groups) research methods with the sample selection for both research methods being based on students of Södertörns University. Results indicate that negative customer reviews have a stronger influence on consumers than positive customer reviews when analyzing products that are equally characterized by the promotion goals and prevention goals.

Title Greenlighted employees ? The internal value of Schenker?s environmental work.Author David Fridner.Course Master thesis in Science of Media and Communication.Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Gothenburg.Semester Spring semester 2009.Tutor Professor Monika Djerf-Pierre.Number of pages 55 (appendix 23).Aim The aim is to study the internal value of Schenker?s environmental work.Method Qualitative and quantitative method.Material 20 interviews from four workgroups: managers (4), sales (5), customer-services (4) and truck drivers (7). 148 websurveys from two workgroups: sales (106) and customer-services (42).Main result Schenker is perceived as an environmentally friendly enterprise. Much due to the fact that the company?s impact on nature only has little to do with how the staff evaluate its ?greenness?.

This study aims to explore how self scanning affects consumers impulse buying. Up til this day researchers are not aware how technologies like self scanning affects consumers behavior in-store. Consumers with self scanners are able to keep track of the rising sum, which could affect their buying behavior, especially when it comes to impulse purchase. Furthermore customers have to commit to scanning products which keep them from browsing the store for offers, which could limit the impulse buying. This study undertake a descriptive methodology with Beatty and Ferrells impuls model from 1998 as a theoretical platform where we examine disparities between self scanners and non self scanners.

The struggle for the customer has become a priority for the fashion industriesconsidering that it is the customers? willing to shop that guarantees theircontinuous survival on today?s competitive market. To keep the customer happyand satisfied, should be their priority as this leads to an economic advantagesince the customer becomes the companies strongest allay with help of the socalled ?word of mouth? effect. The positive response is then transmitted fromthe customer, acting as a spokes- person for the company.