By exposing their products in blogs, companies have the opportunity to reach out to hundreds of thousands of consumers daily. Instead of using conventional Internet advertising such as banners and ads, some companies chose to make use of product placement in blogs. By choosing to expose their products in blogs, companies use a medium that blog readers are familiar with and can relate to, and can thereby solicit customers for their products and brands.We will examine whether product placements in fashion blogs are an effective way for businesses to market themselves and their products. We measure this efficiency, by keeping a record of the sales of ten product placed garment and accessories that we have selected from four of the largest blogs in Sweden. The stores we examine sales of product placed goods in are volume brand stores such as Zara and H&M etcetera.

Male piglets have been castrated for centuries to avoid contamination of their meat with boar taint, a strongly unpleasant odour that makes the meat inedible. Today boar taint can be prohib-ited by vaccination against gonadotropin releasing hormone (GnRH) using Improvac®. The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficiency of vaccination on growth performance and behaviour of vaccinated male pigs compared to surgically castrated male pigs. The effect of two feeding regimes, restricted (SLU-norm) and semi ad libitum, was also included in the study. At birth, pigs (n=206) were randomly allocated to the two treatment groups; surgically castrated and vaccination.

Identification and analysis of key success factors for an entrepreneurial firm to achieve leverage when establishing on a foreign market with a premium consumer product..

Hundreds of thousands of piglets are castrated without anesthesia in Sweden every year so that we may be guaranteed meat without boar odor. The smell appears while cooking meat of boar and is described as urine- and sweat-like. High levels of androstenone and skatole are considered the main factors behind boar odor. Skatole is a metabolite of the amino acid tryptophan, which is formed in the colon of all pigs. Androstenone is a steroid hormone that is released from the Leydig cells in the testes of boars.

Ribs from sheep, goat and pig are rarely assessed  to species due to the fact that they are very similar in their morphology and size. The ribs are instead considered unidentifiable although it is possible to see what kind of bone it is. If these ribs would be identified to species not only would species assessment degree of archaeological source material   increase, the relationship between meat-rich and meat poor regions would change.To find out whether there are morphologically measurable differences between sheep, goat and pig ribs, three measurement points on each rib has been defined and measured. At each measurement point two measurements were measured, one medial-lateral measurement and one cranial-caudal measurement. The ratio between the medial- lateral measurement and the cranial-caudal measurement was calculated for each point.

Due to a growing interest in communication in today?s society the demand for equipment that is used in communication networks increases while the competition between companies that produce this equipment grows. To meet the increasing demand and at the same time having a competitive product development many companies use some effective product design, such as the modular product design. When a modular product design is used it?s good to compare different module configurations for a certain product and to simplify these comparisons some tool can be used.

Background: Knowledge of customer needs is a key factor in companies? struggle to develop successful products. Several studies illustrate that the main reason for failure in product development is lack of customer understanding. Lately considerable changes have occurred. Large-scale mass production is continuously being replaced by customer orientation, especially in the high technological market.

The design of packages is something that product manufacturers put great effort on. The package is often the consumers' first interaction with a product and consumers judge the product based on the package. A common way to evaluate a package design is to let respondents look at a package and answer which attributes they think the product has. This paper wants to take this evaluation a step further, i.e. it examines if consumers experience differences in taste between two identical products that have different package designs.

The purpose of the study is to explain whether the introduction of a new and different brand by means of a brand extension affects consumers? perceptions of the product category that the brand is launched in. An experiment was carried out to study the following aspects: associations and constellations of associations to the product category, interest, perceived variation, and the perceived similarity with the category from which the brands were extended. In the study, brand breadth in the original product category was used as moderating variable. Aspects found to be affected by the brand extensions were associations to the product category, the constellations of these associations and the perceived similarity with the category from which the brands were extended.

The thesis strives to answer the question whether there are any differences between how young customers, in comparison with older, are affected by brands when buying different products. The purpose is to get a clearer idea about the brands' importance in the future and in that way also to give guidance to companies about how to best market themselves and there products.To answer the question, an experiment was conducted with 480 respondents taking a survey where they had to rate a product after reading a short text about it. Some of the texts stated that a specific brand was behind the product while some said the product was produced by an unknown brand.The result of the study was that young people showed a greater propensity of rating products with a brand higher than products without brands, in comparison with the older respondents. This gives reason to believe that brands progressively will become an even more important tool for marketers and an unmatched asset for companies in the future..

Project Safe Sleeping Position (SSP) contains all parts in a product development phase. The project comprises the whole cycle from idea to a complete product where all aspects are included. The scope is to develop an innovative solution for a common known problem and work with all parts within the man-machine-way. The result is an inflatable product which secures a child in the correct way for the seatbelt to work properly in the rearseat of a car. Ergonomics, technical extent, usability, design, construction, product solutions and market potential are some of all parts witch the project includes.

This report is the concluding part of the course national minorities, main focus on design, at Luleå University of Technology spring 2007. The purpose of this written examination is to produce a prototype to a product, which can be used both when marketing Kiruna as a student municipality and when recruiting students to the study programmes Kiruna offers. The product has been produced through systematic problem solving, where methods to fix the problem, gather facts, examine and come to a solution have been used. The product should in one way or another get the student to think of Kiruna as a student municipality and it should also appeal to the target group ? the students.

The purpose of this study was to describe the possibility of implementing a lacto-ovo-vegetarian and organic diet in Eskilstuna municipality?s public preschool. Furthermore the purpose was to identify and describe the most important components involved in the implementation and their influence in the process.  The methods used were a survey based on a literature study. This study includes general information about Meat production and consumption and also the use of pesticides in farming. It also brings up the environmental and health effects caused by the previously mentioned areas.

In 1993, Sweden signed the Convention on Biological Diversity and thus agreed to conserve our indigenous biological diversity. As a part of the convention, Sweden is obliged to conserve a number of domestic animal breeds and among them the Linderöd pig. In 1952, the zoo, Skånes Djurpark, took care of a pregnant sow that was regarded to be related to the old "forest pig". The old forest pig was thought to have been extinguished by the early 20th century as a result of the ban on boars not approved by state inspectors. However, according to later accounts, several farmers still kept some of these non-approved pigs.

This study explores how consumers' attitudes and intentions-to-buy towards an atypical product can be influenced by the presentation of the product and consumers shopping goals. Moreover, another product, which was shown together with the atypical piece, was analyzed in order to investigate context effects. The aim of the study is to provide insights into a rather unexplored subject and help retailers in presenting their assortment in a way which will create a better perception and intention-to-buy towards the assortment. The study was conducted with the help of two studies, the first one aimed to find an atypical item and to see how attitudes could be affected by differences in presentation by comparing it with a typical item within the same category. The second study used the identified atypical piece in order to see the how attitude and intention-to-buy could be altered by presentation and consumer shopping goals.