The Swedish do-it-yourself (DIY) market has expanded in recent years and is today a SEK90 billion market. Competition is fierce, however, and the DIY retail chains compete over market share with extensive marketing campaigns. Advances in computer technology have made it possible to acquire and compile huge quantities of point of sale data. However, due to a lack of economic theories and statistical methods, this data cannot be effectively utilized and the effects of the campaigns are not measured in any detail. In this study a new method was used to examine the effects of marketing campaigns in the DIY consumer market.

Museums are a part of the cultural sector that over the last couple of years had to compete with the steadily growing consumption of spectacles. New techniques to attract and amaze the visitors have evolved. Living History Museums has developed a method to simulate past times by building up an environment with reconstructions. History is a non-definite science, there will never be an exact answer to how it really was, for example during the Middle Ages.This essay deals with the difference between reconstructions and authentic artefacts and how they build up an illusion of the past. In what sense does it matter if the artefacts are genuine or not? How do these museums deal with anachronistic phenomena from today's modern world in the historic environment? Additionally I discuss whether or not these reconstructions - of environment, buildings and personal characters - have any influence on the historic narrative given by the museum.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate if there are any differences regarding syntactic complexity in written language between persons with (phonologically based) reading and writing difficulties and a control group. Earlier research has pointed to such a difference, indicating that texts written by subjects with reading and writing difficulties display a lower grade of syntactic complexity than text written by control groups.Two texts each from 48 subjects (24 from each category) were collected. The subjects were divided in two age groups, one consisting of 15-year-olds and the other of university students (adults in various ages). The subjects were selected through a word decoding test and a spelling test, where the lowest performing formed the group of reading and writing difficulties and the highest performing formed the control groups. All subjects had Swedish as their mother tongue.The syntactic aspects studied were number of words per syntactic sentence (Sw.

The Swedish energy company Vattenfall is currently the owner of the district heatingsystems in Nyköping and Motala. To be able to also offer cooling solutions tocustomers are becoming more and more important. This report describes the resultsof an investigation of the cooling market in the two cities and the potential needs forcooling today and in the coming 20 years. The total potential for the coming 20 yearsis estimated to be roughly 17 MW for Nyköping and 9 MW for Motala.Two possible district cooling systems for each of the two city centers was modeledand a comparison was made between different cooling techniques namely absorptionand compressor chillers.Absorption chillers driven with district heating during the summer is one way ofincreasing the load in a combined heat and power plant and thereby the possibleelectricity generation. The cost of heat production must be low for absorption chillerto be able to compete as an alternative.

The postindustrial market increasingly demands service infused products to add more value to the customer in order to be competitive. Much research regarding digitalized services indicates that companies have to be innovative in order to compete on the market. However, companies within different industries face different challenges with digital service development. This study has been conducted because there are little known about the opportunities and the challenges different industries faces with a globalized market. Our research question is what the challenges are and what opportunities does strategic digital service development entails for companies.

To identify and evaluate apple cultivars is not an easy task, since the taste and appearances of the fruit are affected by where the apple tree grows. At the Balsgård new apple gene bank there is a unique and interesting collection of over 260 different cultivars from all over the world. To find out if these cultivars are consistent with previously published descriptions, the fruit was evaluated for some of the cultivars. Among the evaluated cultivars some were selected that could be suitable for cultivation and/or fruit breeding. A few cultivars were in addition analyzed at a consumer evaluation at the Kivik apple market where visitors could vote for the most beautiful apple and the best taste.

The Swedish consumer electronic industry has recently experienced an increasingly intensive price war. The price war has forced some operators in the business to declare bankruptcy, as the only way to compete has been by driving down prices. A challenge that retail chains in the consumer electronics industry is facing is to increase their margins. If store personnel can success with upselling, the companies will increase their profits. The purpose of this paper is to examine if the sales people in the consumer electronic industry can influence the customer to buy a more expensive product and what the effects the upselling has on the customers' attitudes.

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.

AbstractBuying real estate property is a complex process for the uninitiated. Apotential buyer has to keep track of laws and regulations affecting theproperty. The purchase of a property is for many also the largest deal made inlife and because of that it is especially important to make sure everything getsdone correctly.A real estate property purchase contains a number of different elements, suchas engineering data and inspection of the property and documentation to makesure that the signing of contracts and clauses are done according to the laws ofthat country. These purchase process steps are ordinary people not familiarwith, and therefore they hire the help of a real estate agent.Buying a property abroad complicates things because the countries have theirown laws and rules that make them different from the Swedish rules which theSwedish real estate buyers are accustomed to.Our thesis is about exploring if a Swedish buyer knows the buying process inforeign countries, or whether they rely on the broker they hired. The countrieswe have chosen to examine and compare against Sweden is Spain, Thailandand Turkey.Our questions will be answered by interviewing buyers about how they feelabout their buying process, if they encountered any problems before, duringor after their purchase, and if they are happy with their purchase after theevent.Our study shows that the buying processes in all four countries are generallyequal to each other.

The purpose of this essay is to examine the relationship between visual communication and female homosexuality within the field of magazine design. As the creative part of the project I have chosen to make a redesign of Lotus magazine, the very first Swedish magazine with lesbian and bisexual girls as the target audience. The questions of which the project is based on are: Which stereotypes, differences and similarities can be found in visual communication addressed to a heterosexual versus a homosexual target audience? What kind of design attracts non-heterosexual girls and how can I create a design for Lotus magazine that is appealing to lesbian and bisexual girls and yet still makes it possible to compete with traditional girls? magazines? In order to examine my research questions I have done literature studies within the field of gender and sexual identity in relation to visual communication. Additionally, I have analysed the design of competing magazines on the market and conducted a survey among representatives of the target audience of Lotus magazine..

If you have access to wood, a wood burning boiler is a cheap way to heat your home, but it is certainly not the most convenient option. Wood requires many operations and management, which takes time. One way to reduce this workload is to have a modern boiler with automatic ignition. Enertech/CTC has a desire to create an accessory with automatic ignition to a modern wood burning boiler. Today there is no boiler on the market that can ignite firewood automatically without the introduction of paper and sticks.

The market for fashion and interior consists of a large amount of retail chains, which together creates high competition. To be able to compete and to be the most obvious choice for the customers, retailers must review their activities that exist in the company and improve them. This concerns store chains since it is so important that the stores communicate the retailers strategy and it is very critical because of the impact that the stores have on the communication with customers. It is after all in the stores that the buying decision is made. With this information, it is important to strive for uniformity through the chain and especially the stores.

The Swedish automotive industry has since way back been struggling with bankruptcy, abroad buy outs and staff cuts. Competition and pressure on prices are two factors that affect the automotive industry. Because of this, the companies are pressured to continuously developing their work in addition to be able to compete on the market. The aircraft industry has successfully managed to implement additive manufacturing (AM) and for motorsport has several components manufactured with AM been used. When AM is used as a manufacturing method, there are a number of advantagesthat follows.

In all equestrian sports except for individual voltige, men and women compete on equal terms, which otherwise is very rare in sports. This study examines from a gender perspective how female and male riders are reffered to by expert commentators in competitions. The aim is to see if there are differences in how the riders are depicted and mentioned based on gender. The material consists of comments about eight rides, four performed by female riders and four by male riders, from two large international world cup competitions in dressage, broadcasted on SVT in 2012 and 2013. The material has been transcribed and then analyzed using content analytic method with a quantitative and a qualitative part.

This survey examines how a regional archive, Värmland Archives, interprets and works from the departure point of national cultural accessibility goal ?Everyone should have the opportunity to participate in cultural life?. And it is also a comporative study of discourse regarding accessibility between Värmland Archives and some other actors in the archival cultural system. Critical discourse analysis, according to Norman Fairclough, is used as a theory method. A discourse analysis is made on empirical data based on document study and qualitative research interviews. My conclusion is that if the term Accessibility is seen as a focal point the accessibility discourse in the documents of Värmland Archives and of the other actors studied can not be clearly discerned. Värmland Archives´s interpretation of terms regarding accessibility analyzed in the survey, varies among the staff regarding how the archives and its services should be accessible, and what accessibility means in the context of the archives.