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.

This thesis examines the possible beneficial effects of a temporary cooperation between a national brand and a private brand. The main hypothesis suggests that if a national brand wants to make a category extension to a remote Product Category, it should be able to decrease its risk by affiliating itself with a private brand. The national brand should through such a brand alliance be able to borrow some of the flexible characteristics that a private brand possesses to increase its associations with the new category. The survey consisted of 800 questionnaires with different cooperations between a private brand (ICA) and two national brands (Tropicana and Bravo). These were handed out to students in the universities of Stockholm.

This paper studies patterns of consumption within a Product Category. Using make-up as a base for the study, we applied the Mokken Scale to examine if consumers follow a hierarchical pattern when buying items within the Product Category. Based on a survey of 250 female respondents, we establish a hierarchic scale for consumption. Assuming generally accepted attributes for determining physical attractiveness, the results of the Mokken Scale study were cross referenced with a survey among 200 male and female respondents. Students were asked to evaluate pictures of a model using different combinations of make-up, i.e.

Almost every day newspapers cover companies and brands in crisis. This should worry companies as negative publicity has been shown to have a great influence on consumer perceptions on brands. In addition, brand crises have been shown to be contagious, meaning that they also affect consumers? views on other similar brands. This study aims to investigate spill-over effects of one brand crisis to another within a Product Category.

Multi-brand portfolios are characterized by comprising many brands in the same Product Category. Companies that have chosen to organize their products according to this strategy are facing both possibilities, such as expanding the accessible market size, and challenges such as how to organize the brands, their individual roles and their relation and position to the other brands in the category to maximize revenues. To address these aspects of multi-brand portfolios, I have investigated four product categories where multiple brands are represented at Mölnlycke Health Care, Unilever, Fagerhult and L?Oréal; how the multi-brand portfolios are organized, how the segmentation, positioning and product differentiation are done and what advantages and disadvantages that are associated with this strategy. My conclusions are that multi-brand portfolios can be organized in many different ways and to become successful, they have to be set in relation to the company?s whole brand architecture.

Smartphone applications, or apps, are an increasingly important part of omnichannel retailing. While the adoption and usage of apps for communicating with consumers has grown exponentially over the past few years, there is little academic research in this area. The primary purpose of this thesis is to describe how the involvement in a Product Category affects consumers' intention to use a retailer-branded smartphone application during their shopping trip. Drawing upon recent IS-literature with models TAM and UTAUT, our results indicate that Product Category involvement constitutes an important factor on the intention to use a retailer-branded smartphone application. By viewing involvement as a multidimensional construct, our study shows that the degree of hedonic and expressive value a product cateogry provides consumers with has important effects on intention, and these relationships are not moderated by consumers' age.

This paper quantitatively examines the effects of marketing brands within the same Product Category and the same brand portfolio jointly. We have chosen to call this type of marketing category advertising. The results of the study show that category advertising leads to increased brand awareness within the category, which is particularly important for brands within less salient subcategories. For strong brands however, category advertising leads to lower purchase intentions, an effect which could potentially be moderated by focusing the advertisement on the complementary nature of the products combined with promotional elements. The study also shows that there is no difference between advertising products jointly and separately when it comes to brand attitude, category attitude, typicality, brand purchase intention for weak brands and category purchase intention.

The business world has been through an extreme transformation over the past decades, which have forced companies to look at themselves from a new point of view. Consumers have a complete new set of ways to gather information and are more motivated than ever to make sustainable consumption choices. This change of attitudes among consumers has made companies focus on other things than price versus quality. A whole new concept has been brought up to questioning: environmentalism. Consumers demand more organically produced products.

The research aims at revealing consumers? loyalty to a high involvement Product Category, connected to a loyalty membership club. Hence, the study aims at explaining similarities and differences between two markets, differently developed in terms of loyalty clubs. The study used IKEA, its loyalty club IKEA FAMILY and women as the company?s main target group, in a case format to study loyalty membership clubs.

Product development is essential for all companies that want to survive in competitive markets regardless of the characteristics of the product that the company sells. Companies that sell products within product categories which can be seen as bad, also need to develop their products in order to remain competitive. If these bad products add a positive attribute, for example that they get organic, a contradiction within the product arises and they get incongruent. This thesis investigates which effects that follow a launch of an incongruent product. The thesis also examines if these effects are affected by the strength of the brand under which the product is launched.A total of 240 respondents participated in an experimental study where product incongruity was manipulated for two different product categories, where one well known brand and one unknown brand were examined in each category.

The main drivers of luxury consumption is to obtain prestige and status, therefore the possibility of visible consumption of products is a key dimension of the product. Typical examples of luxury goods include cars, handbags and watches. These are consumed in the public arena where the possibility to show off the product and the brand is the greatest. When examining luxury products and what drives men and women to pay premium prices for a brand and for a logo, a fascinating finding is that there are products that fundamentally lacks these attributes, but which are considered to be classic luxury products. An example of this is perfume.

Multichannel-shopping has become a wide spread phenomenon in the retail industry due to a significant development of retail channels and formats. Consumers now shop for the same Product Category in many different retail settings and this trend is increasing. Therefore both the academic world and the retail industry are screaming for knowledge about the multichannel-shoppers. Several studies have focused on the characteristics of different channels and how multichannel strategies should be designed to minimize cannibalization. There is however a lack of research concerning what characterizes multichannel-shoppers and what drives them to shop in several channels.

The supermarkets are taking more and more market shares for potted plants the last years, and a greater part is bought without prior planning. Signals from several European countries, for example Denmark and UK, indicate that potted plants with added value have become more and more popular and the added value is based on present trends. The meaning of added value in this thesis is fancy pots, packaging, pins or arrangements. Potted plants with added value sold in supermarkets offer the consumer the advantage of getting a ?ready product? quick and easy.

Research has concluded that meaningless differentiation with trivial attributes sometimes can be a successful strategy. However, the effect varies with respect to certain aspects such as the price of the product and the decision context. How the characteristics of the consumer influence the effect of trivial attributes has until now been unknown. This thesis investigates how the consumer?s level of knowledge and personal involvement influence the effects of trivial attributes on product preferences and product attitudes.

The number of products offered by retailers has increased immensely during the last two decades, which has resulted in an increase of naming decisions having to be made. The importance of product names has become more significant for retailers offering their products online, as these are more visible to the customer in comparison to products offered offline. Consequently, it is of great value for retailers to gain knowledge about how a product name affects the customers' perception of the product. The purpose of this study is to examine whether product names affect customers perception of the relevant products in the online environment. This has been illustrated by applying the following theories to the relevant product names; meaningful and meaningless brand names as well as concrete and abstract words.