Today, branding is not a phenomenon but rather a prerequisite for a brand to be able to both survive and grow stronger. During the last couple of years, personal branding has come to be an established term, just like corporate branding. With the growth of the social media and the thousands of ways to interact with each other personal brands face great competition. It is more difficult than ever to maintain a strong brand, partly because of this. There are several growth options for brands.

The competition policy in the EU should guarantee that the competition is not distorted in the way that would prevent or create difficulties for the free mobility of goods and services between Member states. It is prohibited for companies to abuse their dominant position according to Article 82, if it affects trade. The essence of Article 82 is control of market power. The perfect competition results when supply and demand appoint the price and quantity of a product. Firms are encouraged to compete then it results in efficiency, quality products and lower prices.

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.

The purpose of this thesis was to investigate how an industrial company can increase customer value by offering added services to their core products. Theses added services can be categorized into the three different parts of the buying process. The company that was investigated is Smurfit Kappa Kraftliner in Piteå, a large international industrial company active on a business to business market. We have conducted a case study and made interviews with three respondents within the company. The result of the study show that the company offers value added services in each stage of the buying process.

    The purpose of this essay is to examine trust, or lack of trust, in the social services. Previous research considering this topic is limited, which, in our point of view, implies the need of further studies. A quantative method was used, consisting of an online questionnaire containing statements about the social services. The statements were designed using a five level Likert-scale which required the respondent to rate their level of agreement. The questionnaire was published on five webcommunities directed to parents.

The gaming market is growing and the number of people, men and women, who play computer games, is also increasing every day. In addition, computer games are also interactive media which leads to the fact that product placement in computer games attracts and is used more frequently by marketers. It is therefore important for marketers and game developers to understand how product placement in computer games affects players' attention and attitude towards the brand or product that is product placed. We therefore examine how product placement in computer games affects players' recall of and attitude towards the brand. The aim is to help companies and game developers to see the effect of product placement in computer games on players and thus product place more efficiently.

This project has been created with the assistance of Fredells. Fredells is a Stockholm based company with a focus on the retail of building products. Fredells also produces prefab- or prefabricated products which are either completely or partially ready for assembly the moment they arrive to the building site. These prefab-products are primarily delivered to customers within the Stockholm region. The building industry is a conservative market where the incentive to changes has been relatively low compared to other industries.

World wide globalization and the rapid development of the Internet have lead to significant changes for companies around the world. The world has ?shrunk? and increased supply of goods and services has lead to a more intense competitive situation. As the market changes, so does consumer behavior. Today?s consumers do no longer wish to be treated as a group, rather they are looking for products and services that specifically fit their personal values.Recent years, the consumption of digital consumer electronics has sky-rocketed.

Abstract Tutor - Anders Richtnér History - Theories suggest that Lean Product Development strategies dramatically increase a company's performance through enabling faster T-T-M, Quality and Costs of Product Development. Purpose - The purpose of this paper is therefore to investigate whether the implementation of LPD actually affect corporate performance measurements T-T-M, Quality and Cost, in a positive way. Methodology - This Bachelor thesis is an exploratory investigation of the concept of Lean Product Development within a global IT- company, performed through four case studies, interviews and complementing corporate performance data. Findings - With empirical data and subsequent analyzes in mind, we note the following; it is clear that the project that produced the best results, in terms of T-T-M, Quality and Cost, also was the one furthest in the process of implementing Lean Product Development..

Integration av system har varit ett aktuellt område under de senaste åren. Det har då främst handlat om integration av system internt på företag. En av anledningarna till det stora intresset av web services är möjligheterna att integrera olika system, exempelvis stordatorbaserade och Windowesbaserade system med varandra. Web services handlar om att kunna integrera system, både internt på ett företag och externa mellan olika företags olika typer av system. Allt detta görs via Internet och bygger på att man utgår i från standards när man bygger web services.

Detta examensarbete behandlar Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) och dess implementeringar Jini och Web services. SOA beskriver hur applikationsintegration mellan olika plattformar skall ske och innebär att applikationer designas som tjänster för att enkelt integreras med andra applikationer. Dynamisk lokalisering av tjänster via en registertjänst används för att applikationer skall finna andra applikationer. Vi designar och implementerar en mekanism i Web services som gör det möjligt att byta en tjänst under exekvering. Ett sådant byte kan vara intressant av två skäl, tjänster kan registreras utan att vara tillgängliga, eller att det uppstår ett fel under exekvering som gör att tjänsten blir otillgänglig..

The aim of this study in social work was to investigate Swedish part-time sex workers' experiences of selling sex, of the Swedish Prohibition of Purchase of Sexual Services Act, of people's attitudes toward selling and buying sexual services and the consequences thereof. In the analysis the Erving Goffman stigma theories were used.Three part-time sex workers described their day-to-day experiences of selling sex as well as holding an ordinary job. None of them experienced that the Prohibition of Purchase of Sexual Services Act had an immediate effect on them in their work, what bothered them most was the attitudes toward sex work from society, friends and relatives. The negative attitude forced them to live a double life. None of the sex workers had the impression that the legislation had any concrete effects on their customers.

Purpose: We wish to gain a deep knowledge about product development processes in relation to the aspect of time in companies in highly technological and rapidly changing markets. The purpose is to establish how organizations better can employ time as a resource to make the product development process more efficient. Conclusions: Information we gathered from theory and primary data show that information flow, synchronization and time profit when seeing time in three dimensions are factors which should be reflected in the architecture of a product development process. To illustrate our findings, we decided to create a model..

In the ever increasing media clutter it is hard for marketers to make their products stand out. New ways of reaching consumers are constantly arising. This study seeks to further investigate the phenomenon known as product placement, delimited to movies/television. By conducting an experiment we tested whether different presumptions matters for what effect a product placement will have on attitude and if these could be affected. We also looked at if the level of product integration effect attitude and realism enhancement.

The use of thin and attractive models to promote companies' products is widespread among marketers. This is true even for companies whose products have little or no association with beauty or body weight. As the proportion of overweight people continues to grow in many developed countries the ideals used by marketers to attract customers strays further away from the actual attributes of the customers themselves. What is little understood is what effect overweight has on the efficiency of the product promoter. Some limited research has studied how the efficiency of the product promoters in printed advertisements is affected by the existence of congruence between the product promoter and the product itself.