Term: Spring term 2007Study objects: Reitan Servicehandel AB, Vi-butikerna, ICA Sverige ABPurpose: The purpose of this study is to analyse how procurement is used as a strategy to achieve better competitive strength, within the retail food industry.Theoretical: The theoretical chapter illustrates different procurement organisations, multiple and single sourcing, brand equity, consumer behaviour and involvement, Efficient Consumer Response including supply chain and category management and finally Demand Chain Management.Method: For the case studies, three food retail companies have been interviewed: Reitan Servicehandel AB, Vi-butikerna and ICA AB. To illustrate how consumer behaviour influences retail food market, several secondary consumer research studies have been analysed.Conclusions: The results indicate that the procurement organisation can achieve a better competitive strength by a centralised organisation, which make it possible to improve conditions of terms when ordering higher purchase volumes. The sourcing strategies can improve a company?s power within the supply chain. All companies within the study had a very good knowledge about consumer behaviour.

The chief aim of this study is to investigate the impact of context on written peer response. A second aim is to explore students? attitudes towards peer response. The investigation has taken place at an upper secondary school in the south-east of Sweden, involving 20 students in grade 2 and 3 in the course Swedish C. The investigation is based on the students? comments on their peers? speech drafts and six qualitative interviews.

The chief aim of this study is to investigate the impact of context on written peer response. A second aim is to explore students? attitudes towards peer response. The investigation has taken place at an upper secondary school in the south-east of Sweden, involving 20 students in grade 2 and 3 in the course Swedish C. The investigation is based on the students? comments on their peers? speech drafts and six qualitative interviews.

A purchase decision can be seen as a multifaceted context that raises many unanswered questions. Understanding the consumer's evaluation of alternatives is complex and should be studied at a deeper rather than wider scale. There is a problem for retailers to understand how the consumer manages a purchase decision in a retail setting with durables goods that generates a higher effort. The aim is to describe the decision rules used by the consumer and how they are expressed in this context. A better understanding of which ones they use and how they are conveyed will help retailers to create effective marketing solutions that generate positive outcomes as increased profitability and customer satisfaction.

The chief aim of this study is to investigate the impact of context on written peer response. A second aim is to explore students? attitudes towards peer response. The investigation has taken place at an upper secondary school in the south-east of Sweden, involving 20 students in grade 2 and 3 in the course Swedish C. The investigation is based on the students? comments on their peers? speech drafts and six qualitative interviews.

How effective is consumer power? Can consumers regulate corporate behavior?And if so is the case, could the mechanisms where consumers regulate corporatebehavior have any democratic value to contribute with? These are the questionsthat this master's thesis comprehends with. The purpose of this writing is toconstruct a theory of consumer power that is compatible with democratic theory,this in order to contribute to the ongoing discussion within the discipline ofpolitical science about the third democratic transformation. A discussion that hasbeen actualized due to the democratic deficit created by the growing corporatepower and the shift of power from state to private enterprises. Besides showingfor a parallel between the democratic mechanisms that exists in the relationbetween citizens and state on the one hand, and the consumers and corporationson the other hand, this paper argues that consumers do have a great potential inregulating corporate behavior towards a higher social responsibility andawareness.

Within the subject of retouching there is an ongoing debate about whether fashion retailers should retouch their ads or not. There has been a large amount of criticism to the communication of stereotyped beauty ideals that is used by companies in their marketing. The stereotyped ideals also contribute to negative psychological effects among people. As a response to the criticism, or as a way to differentiate one-self from competitors, retailers are starting to use unretouched models in their advertising. How this affects the consumer's perception of CSR along with the attitudes and behaviors is still unknown.

The aim of the present study was to investigate response time variations in tasks for assessment of high level language functions and how response time is related to education, age and gender. Response time is defined as the time to complete a task after it has been presented. 103 subjects, aged 20 to 80 years, were tested with the Assessment of Subtle Language Disorders, Sentence analysis and Morphological completion. The subtest Comprehension of ambiguous sentences showed the longest response time and Morphological completion the shortest. Correlations were found between increasing age and longer response time for Comprehension of metaphors and between education and response time for several subtests.

Consumer involvement in the product development process, co-creation, is being practiced by numerous companies. Previous research has investigated how consumer participation in co-creation affects consumer attitude. However, little is known about how co-creation affects the attitudes of the observervers of co-creation. The effect of observed co-creation on consumer attitude should be important when deciding whether to apply co-creation or not, as the observing consumers make up a larger part of the consumer collective than the participating consumers do. The paper at hand aims to investigate how observed co-creation affects consumer attitude and purchase intentions.

Feline infectious peritonitis (FIP) is a feline viral disease with high mortality. There is no cure or any effective vaccine available today. Many questions are yet to be answered about this disease and the immune response in affected cats. The aim of the study is to evaluate two different techniques for the study of cytokine profiles in cats vaccinated with a vaccine concept against FIPV. More information about the immune response in these cats could give valuable information to better understand the pathogenesis of the disease and the development of an effective vaccine.

The thesis examines the relationship between consumer attitudes and a scented shopping environment. A relationship and phenomena concerning scent marketing, which could be seen as one of the more provocative forms of marketing since the human sense of smell, is connected to the limbic system where motivation and attitudes are created. The use of scent marketing has, so far, been proven effective in sales increasing whereas it is one of the less explored forms of marketing.The purpose of the thesis is to answer the following question: Is it possible to find differences in consumer attitudes in a scented buying environment compared to a nonscented buying environment, and thereby create new basis for segmentation?The thesis is based on a quantitative study where data has been gathered in a scent manipulated buying environment through structured interviews with consumers. The thesis applies a deductive approach to the main theories in the area of interest.The findings suggest new theory discussing that it is difficult to use consumer attitudes, towards a scented store environment, as a foundation for market segmentation.

The increased media clutter requires of brand managers to be innovative and creative in their choices of marketing communications in order for brands to be salient in the minds of consumers. Recent studies emphasize incongruent marketing as a means of "standing out" from this competitive clutter and reaching existing and new potential customers. The aim of this thesis is to examine the effects of brand incongruent sponsorships (sponsorships which are incongruent with established brand associations) on consumer response to well-established brands from the perspective of high and low levels of loyalty. A quantitative survey was conducted and the results show that incongruent sponsorships improve brand attitude, brand interest and brand credibility, while not affecting ad attitude, purchase intention and word-of-mouth intention for customers of low loyalty. For highly loyal customers the findings were that brand attitude, brand interest, brand credibility, purchase intention and word-of-mouth intention remained unchanged while ad attitude decreased.

Voluntary organisations provided the first consumer guidance in Sweden. The government'sinterest in the question started during the second world war and has ever since increased.Since the 1970's the local authorities, with support from the community, have played animportant roll in consumer policy work. Due to the economic recession of recent years theappropriation to consumer guidance work has been cut down. The work has been rationalisedand libraries have more frequently been used to spread consumer information.In Stockholm the municipal has been responsible for local consumer information since the1940's. Co-operation with the library of Stockholm has occurred in different forms.

The challenge that companies currently face in their attempts to break through the media clutter has resulted in an increased use of provocative advertising worldwide. History shows that this strategy can result in a brand crisis due to negative consumer sentiment. Despite this fact, advertisement generated crisis remain a relatively unexplored field in the academic world of marketing. The objective of this thesis is to further explore crisis creation from provocative advertising, evaluate the affiliated negative consumer consequences, and to examine the effects of two contrasting company strategies to remedy these types of crisis situations. An experiment was conducted on Swedish and Norwegian students in order to examine whether the communication and information sharing between the target consumers and others could explain the development and consequences of provocative advertisement crisis due to its psychological effects.

Incident response plans are faced with new challenges as organisations expands to the cloud, this thesis aims to highlight these challenges and their potential solutions. Our work has focused on managing the incident response in contrast to earlier work that has been focusing on preventing them.As with any development, security is seldom prioritized. Instead the focus are often aimed towards usability and functionality, which means incident response plans are written, implemented, forgotten and finally becomes obsolete. This could result in an organization losing their ability to produce acceptable forensic images, avoid severe downtime, or prevent similar incidents in the future, which are all important parts of incident response.Traditional incident response plans does not address incidents in the cloud. Thus, an absence of guidelines for managing incidents in the cloud becomes apparent.