The retail industry is complex and when it comes to the in-store environment conventional marketing tools seldom find their way. The impacts of in-store atmospherics on customers and the psychological impact the store environment has on their decision-making are rather remarkable. An in-store atmospheric that often is used in order to affect customers is music, in fact it is one of the in-store elements that has been investigated more carefully. Nevertheless, in spite several studies on music and its impact as an in-store atmospheric on customers, it is not yet obvious what applies. To bring some clarity on the subject this study is aspiring to explain what applies when it comes to playing music in grocery stores.

AbstractTitle: Strategic Communication within franchising, a case study of GallerixNumber of pages: 60 (65 with enclosures)Author: Charlotta Babington ThorszeliusCourse: Media and Communication DPeriod: Spring 2008University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science, Uppsala University, SwedenPurpose/Aim: To find out, by doing a case study, how communication between the two parties in a franchising relationship works, and how communication can strengthen the concept and brand. By analysing the communication, identify strengths and weaknesses and make suggestions for improvement.Material/Method: Qualitative method by using interviewsMain results: The understanding of the concept and the relationship between franchiser and franchisees are vital for the success of the franchising chain. The main internal communication channel today is the Intranet, and more personal contacts and meetings are requested. The yearly meetings are appreciated by the franchisees, but the content of the meetings are of varied quality. The chains value words, which are important for how the brand is perceived by the customer, are slightly different from how the franchiser and the franchisees sees them.

Debates about suitable content in children's literature occur regularly. In spring 2010 such a debate took place in Sweden. The purpose of this Bachelor's thesis is to analyse the debate to identify ideas concerning the role of children's literature in society. A second aim is to examine how children's literature is described and which concepts are used by the debaters. The empirical material used for the analysis consists of ten articles, blog posts, radio- and TV- features published in March 2010.

During my final examination project, I have been working with a design process to develop a new set of candle lanterns for the company Sagaform AB. This company has a large and significant role on the Swedish interior design and retail market. The assignment was developed when the company stated that they would like to supplement and expand its existing range of products. The research and surveys I have done have helped me to create eight different concepts and one of them ready to compete with the existing candle lanterns on the market. The result of my concept proposal expected to be included in Sagaform?s 2013 spring catalogue. During the project I have developed 3D-rendered images, a physical model, and a solid foundation for making prototypes. The Balloon has an attractive design language that fits both every day and more festive events.

This thesis is about making a support for barcode readers and RFID readers on a computermounted in heavy vehicles. The computer has several applications designed for heavyvehicles such as an order handling application. The goal was to suggest an architecture toimplement a support for the readers. The architecture should be independent of whichmanufacturer who has made the reader hardware that was connected to the computer.At first a theoretically study was made around RFID technology and standards for thetransport and supply sector. Then the architecture was developed and a demo implementationwas made.The conclusion of this thesis is to implement support for barcode readers with a wedgeapplication.

The Swedish e-commerce has been established for about 25 years, with strong growth from the millennium onwards. The companies that are active within it has many different backgrounds. Mail order companies were some of the early adaptors but today it is also common for companies to first create the e-commerce part of the business, before opening a store. A long list of companies has over the years come and gone, the rotation of the e-shops that are popular have constantly changed. We asked ourselves why.We wanted to get an understanding of the Swedish e-commerce, both from a business perspective and from a customer perspective.

IKEA HaparandaTornio employ some two-hundred people in its furniture retail store.Keeping track of staff statistics and employee information has previously been achievedthrough the use of a basic Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheet. The store?s human resourcesdepartment requested an upgrade to this system with the hope of speeding up andsimplifying the administrative process, as well as to make it easier to monitor HR-relatedtarget statistics. The following report documents the development process of that upgrade ascarried out by the author. The project draws on research in usability design and cognitivepsychology to develop a user-friendly interface.

Today most studies regarding marketing are made on traditional marketing channels, answering questions like which jingle is best or which TV-channel a company should focus their marketing budget on. There is also the science regarding the best way of marketing on Social Networking sites or how to get as many 'likes' as possible, and so forth. However research has also been made in the field of in-store marketing and how a retailers or brand owners can affect customers in "the moment of truth". Until now most of these studies discuss how to get the attention of the customer in the store since both time as well as level of commitment in general is scarce when a customer is in a grocery store doing the necessary weekly- or complementary-shopping. It seems like most of them make the very same conclusion; catching the attention of a customer is vital to sell them your product.

With the globalization, companies in the West chose to shift production to developing countries to cut down costs. This had a major impact when child labor and very poor working conditions in these factories were discovered and led many companies to take responsibility for their suppliers and the employees by adopting voluntary so-called Codes of Conduct.There is a subtle balance to enforce improvement of working conditions for employees at suppliers´ factories and to keep costs down. On the one hand, companies would like to conduct extensive audits at their suppliers to ensure code of conduct compliance and thus protect their legitimacy. On the other hand, audits are expensive so companies would like to minimize audits to keep costs down. Companies thus have to strike a delicate balance in relation to how many and what suppliers they choose to audit.

Companies within the e-commerce industry currently try to overcome the disadvantages of not being able to provide a physical inspection of products, and this is especially an issue for the apparel industry. One way of trying to overcome this issue is by presenting apparel with a short video of a model wearing the garment. The aim in this thesis is to investigate how these video presentations affect consumers' emotions, cognitions and intentions. Since previous studies have found that different shopping scenarios can moderate the effect of stimuli in the atmosphere on the consumers' emotions, we also aim to see if a video presentation, depending on the shopping scenario, could have a negative impact on site visitors. Moreover this thesis investigates the moderating effects of involvement on consumers' cognitions.

The topic of our thesis is Packaging Design as a Brand Building Tool and we are presenting the Scandinavian perspective. We found the topic interesting because, from a theoretical point of view, we identified a scarcity in research focusing on packaging design as a brand management tool, and from a practical point of view, we found out that businesses use packaging design at different levels in their communication efforts. Thus we wanted to provide both academia and business world with a clear picture to what extent and how businesses use packaging design in their brand-building process. Therefore the aim of our thesis is to provide practitioners and academicians alike with a better understanding of how packaging design can be used to create strong brands in the FMCG sector in the Scandinavian market. To reach the stated aim first we provided a solid theoretical background of packaging, its elements and its role in the marketing mix.

The Swedish sports retail industry has experienced extensive growth during the last decade, and this has attracted new entrants to the market, both start-ups and international followers. This has inevitably put more pressure on incumbents, which are now confronted with major challenges as how to retain their customers and market shares. Customer loyalty has been proved to be an important factor for customer retention and proposed to constitute inertia of switching behavior. In light of this problematization, the purpose of this study is to describe the underlying factors of loyalty and whether purchase habits could further explain customer loyalty. The aim is also to understand the strategic implications of the factors involved.

För att minnas långa lösenord är det inte ovanligt att användare rekommenderas att skapa en mening som sedan sätts ihop till ett långt lösenord, en lösenordsfras.Informationsteoretiskt sett är dock ett språk väldigt begränsat och förutsägbart, varför enligt Shannons definition av informationsteori en språkriktig lösenordsfras bör vara relativt lätt att knäcka.Detta arbete riktar in sig på knäckning av språkriktiga lösenordsfraser, dels i syfte att avgöra i vilken grad det är tillrådligt att basera en lösenordspolicy på lösenordsfraser för skydd av data, dels för att allmänt tillgängliga effektiva metoder idag saknas för att knäcka så långa lösenord.Inom arbetet genererades fraser för vidare användning av tillgängliga knäckningsprogram, och språket i fraserna modelleras med hjälp av en Markov-process. I denna process byggs fraserna upp genom att det används antal observerade förekomster av följder av bokstäver eller ord i en källtext, så kallade n-gram, för att avgöra möjliga/troliga nästkommande bokstav/ord i fraserna.Arbetet visar att genom att skapa modeller över språket kan språkriktiga lösenordsfraser knäckas på ett praktiskt användbart sätt jämfört med uttömmande sökning..

The purpose is to explore and describe norms and values concerning emotions and emotional expression inSweden and Greece from an emotionsociological perspective. Do emotional regimes on a national level existand if they do, how do they differ? To answer this question qualitative interviews have been conducted withnine Greek/Swedes, men and women of different ages, who have lived in both countries and who speak bothlanguages. A quantitative survey study, employing a survey previously used in a Swedish study about emotions,has also been undertaken. Previous studies have shown that emotional regimes do differ historically and acrosscultures, but no study so far has focused on the differences between examples of North European and SouthEuropean cultures.The theoretical framework consists mainly of Hochschild´s theories about feeling/display rules and emotionwork, but the analysis also draws on Collin´s theory of interaction ritual chains and on Sociology of Emotionsmore broadly.The results suggest that different national regimes can be distinguished primarily in terms of display rules andin the skills of emotional alternations.

Retail marketing is a field with many different enbranchements. Some of these can be considered relatively well explored, while the lack of knowledge concerning others is almost total. For example, the existing knowledge regardng the possible impact that non-musical sound can have on the customer can be considered non-existent. With this in mind, the intention with the thesis was to closer investigate how non-musical sound can influence the customer's decision process and attitude in and to a grocery store. The authors started out with theories on associative networks and automatic processing.