In this thesis an explorative study was undertaken with the aim to study how a number of private care providers, as well as politicians and officials from councils in and around the Stockholm and Uppsala counties, think about the future of the Swedish elderly care from a property perspective, i.e. homes for the elderly. The analysis shows that there is a demand for capacity in 6 out of 16 municipalities, and that the property is an important part of this capacity, and the fulfillment of it. This was mainly due to the cost of capital, but also because of several other factors such as lack of land, a wish to guide the design, ideology, and in many cases a wish to use the property as an instrument of domination to control private health care providers.Also, the property was show to be connected to economic competition, to freedom of choice, and to quality. The problems related to the property in the market for elderly care still remains to be solved.

Today, Sweden has about forty companies owned by the government. These are active on markets with variable competition. Some have been given special areas of responsibility that in a practical notion make them monopolists. The period when most public companies where formed (and with that the following subjection to competition) during the nineties and early 2000's, forced the formerly protected businesses to act on the terms of the open market. Parallel to this development the brand has for the last twenty years evolved into something great strategic importance for the business, including the business-to-businesses (B2B).

The characteristic of services as an effort carried out in a "moment of truth" implies a risk for failures. This study sheds new light on how alternative offerings that customers are initially exposed to can affect satisfaction and loyalty in the service failure and recovery context. More specifically, two aspects of the initial offering are studied: promised general service quality and the presence of a promise about a specific product attribute. Based on a presentation of the main theoretical perspectives, hypotheses are formulated and a scenario-based experiment in a hotel setting is designed to explore these. The results indicate that a higher level of promised service quality can result in more positive evaluations of satisfaction and stronger word-of-mouth intentions than for a lower level of promised service quality.

This paper examines the relationship between the experienced quality in the offering of a brand, emotional attachment and consumer commitment. The study aim to explore several dimensions of the experienced quality in the offering of a brand. Further we examine two conceptualizations of emotional attachment - Brand Attachment and Brand Love - and intend to declare the two of being two separate phenomena. We then conduct a relationship-based analysis wherein the mediating ability of Brand Attachment and Brand Love, between the experienced quality in the offering of a brand and consumer commitment, is examined. Therefore we conduct a focused quantitative study, wherein 171 customers of the fashion retailer H&M have responded to a comprehensive survey both online and in-store, to examine this fun-damental relationship and its components.

Title: Time to renovate ? The effect of communication on the relationship between company and customer in a change situationCourse/subject:Busniess administration, Leadership, 15hpAuthors:Fredrik Elghag, Ossian OlssonTutors:Ingemar WictorKeywords:The Million Programme, Communication, Relationship Marketing, Tentant, Landlord.Problem formulation:How does communication affect the relationship between company and customer in a change situation?Purpose:Examining how different parts of a communication process affects customers trust, commitment and loyalty to their company.Theoretical framework:The starting point for the study?s theoretical perspectives have been Morgan and Hunt?s (1994) previous studies on relationship marketing and Laswell?s (1948) communication model.Methodology:The paper is performed with a qualitative research approach and a deductive approach to answer the research question. Personal interviews were conducted with four employees in real estate companies and two tenants in each company stock.Conclusion:We have found that communication affects the relationship between company and customer. Tentants have experinced credibility of businesses is important for them to have a confidence and loyalty in the relationship. .

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of using more promotion material to enhance the in-store communication of sales promotion. In the retail industry today the research regarding the benefits from using various in-store promotion materials is limited, thus this study was carried out to bring clarity to this subject. The study is carried out in two pharmacies and the design of the study was to add more promotion materials to one store, while keeping the other store in its normal condition and then let the stores change conditions after one week e.g. latin-square design. The data collection of this study consists of four different methods: sales data, a questionnaire with 182 customers, an observation study of 300 consumers and an eye-tracking experiment with 41 participants.

Most major companies today have a visual identity. It answers questions like: which font do I use? and when can I use the logo or not? Westinghouse Nuclear Fuel in Västerås have a visual identity but no guidelines for the employees to follow. Further-more, rollups and rollup handouts produced by Westinghouse are not mentioned in the visual identity. ?erefore the external information from Westinghouse is someti-mes, both by employees and customers, perceived as not uniform.

The increasing competition is making increasing demands of today's businesses to be changeable. Change projects have therefore become increasingly common in order to satisfy market expectations. These projects have often proved difficult to implement and fail rather than succeed. There are many people who reflect on why this is and theorists are increasingly reasoning about the importance of communication in the change process. This is something that has given rise to a new area of expertise called change management.

Starting out as a minor form of amusement, the game industry has become one of the most lucrative andsuccessful in the entertainment business competing against giants such as television, movies and music.As the internal competition within the developer community grows companies work hard at discoveringnew ways to attract and keep customers. By having a playcentric approach focusing on user experiencethey hope to achieve that goal. This thesis describes the process of designing a game with focus on theplayer. We apply the concept of flow on game development and investigate through research throughdesign if we are able to create a game that keeps the player in flow.Play tests showed several elements such as control issues and too difficult challenges early in the game,affecting the possibility for players to experience flow while playing. These negative factors came to becalled flowleakers.

Most major companies today have a visual identity. It answers questions like: which font do I use? and when can I use the logo or not? Westinghouse Nuclear Fuel in Västerås have a visual identity but no guidelines for the employees to follow. Further-more, rollups and rollup handouts produced by Westinghouse are not mentioned in the visual identity. ?erefore the external information from Westinghouse is someti-mes, both by employees and customers, perceived as not uniform.

The purpose for this study is to look at the Pink Caravans, which is a Swedish travel company that started in the beginning of the seventies. The company today has a unique profile within the travel industry which made us curious about how they have managed to keep their distinctiveness over such a long period of time. We have chosen to focus on how they work with the market in this ever changing world, including aspects regarding for example the customer being more demanding today than before. We have also looked at a potential future for the company considering new trends popping up like the environmental issues. The study is based on a qualitative approach and a case study research regarding the Pink Caravans.

The retail banking market in Sweden is highly concentrated and oligopolistic. This has been confirmed by numerous reports from different competition authorities within the EU, for example the Swedish competition authority. A considerably high number of different sorts of competition barriers has been pointed out in these reports. The competition barriers are mainly directed to the smaller banks and the potential competition. The retail banking market in Sweden is dominated by four major banks, which together has over 80 percent of all market shares.

Denna rapport beskriver en produktutvecklingsprocess som behandlar utvecklandet av ett textilt material som isolerar och skyddar. Det textila materialet ska fungera till ett kylande fodral utan att förstöra dess funktion och behöver därför uppfylla en speciell kravspecifikation. Materialet ska isolera mot kroppsvärme, vara stabilt, skyddande och slitstarkt. Dubbelväv valdes tidigt i arbetet då det är ett enkelt sätt att kunna påverka det textila materialets egenskaper i form av material- och konstruktionsval, i en betydligt större utsträckning än i en enkelsidig väv. För att utveckla ett material med de efterfrågade egenskaperna har tester utförs och den metod som har använts är hypotesprövning.

This report describes the development process of a pipe clamp used on exhaust system for cars. It is made based on the manufacturers desire to improve and make the clamp easier to manufacture and to reduce its price to their customers. This should be done either by manufacturing the clamp in one piece without an expensive and work intensive welding process, or by generating ideas of how to develop a brand new type of clamp. Investigating the market for similar products was done to eliminate intrusion of other manufacturers? patents but also to generate ideas.

The customer behavior is constantly changing along with the developement of new technical improvements. Together with knowledge and higher demands the physical store has received a viral competitor. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the phenomenon e-commerce and how it has developed in recent years. The study will focus on identifying different success factors relevant for this field of interest. Furthermore the purpose is to analyze how relationships, service and value in the e-commerce sector and how they are connected to each other.