This thesis is about how the front-staff in two service companies experience empowerment. Competition for business in today's society is becoming increasingly fierce, which means that they must find a way to differentiate themselves from competitors. Service has become a way to compete. Front-staff competence and ability to offer a good service is a crucial factor when the company's success is being measured.Empowerment in business is used as a tool to create motivation and satisfaction of individuals at work. Companies using empowerment can create the freedom and opportunities for employees to act at their own intelligence and discretion.

Even though provocative marketing is a widely used tool among companies to distin-guish themselves from the crowd and catch the attention of consumers, there are several variables that remain relatively unexplored. This paper aims to investigate what impact the brand has on how provocative advertising is perceived and how it affects attitudes and behavior. An experiment was conducted where several well-established measures of ad effectiveness such as brand attitude, buying intentions and word-of-mouth intentions were used to analyze the effects of brand knowledge. The results show that a provocative advert lowers attitude and buying inten-tions for the established brand while it remains unchanged for the unestablished brand. This implicates bigger freedom for unestablished brands to elaborate with provocative elements in their marketing.

The purpose of this study is to increase the understanding for how home care services interpret and handle situations with and around caretakers alcohol use. Interviews have been conducted with two managers and six basic staff in two different home care service-groups. The interviews were individual with the managers and in group form with the staff. The interviews have been analyzed using Hasenfeld?s theory on Human Service Organizations and moral practice together with Beronius? interpretation of disciplinary exercise of power.

As a consumer often chooses product or service to satisfy the specific needs or desires. However, there is more often than not several brands that manufacture the same product, which means we also have to choose between these brands before we can calm our needs. This choice is usually an active decision. We choose a brand that we are familiar with, or a brand whose identity appeals to us. The brand thus has a major impact on both consumers' decision-making in connection with the purchase, but also for business success.

Bokakademin i Östergötland AB möter framtiden ? En studie av studenters köpbeteende vad gäller kurslitteratur och ett förslag på marknadsföringsstrategi för Bokakademin (Bokakademin i Östergötland AB meets the future ? A study of students? purchasing behaviour regarding textbooks and a proposal for a marketing strategy for Bokakademin)Authors: Fabian Hamnqvist and Emma SvenssonBachelor?s thesis in business administration Linköping University, Department of Management and Engineering, 2013 Supervisor: Mehran NoghabaiAbstractThis paper examines the competition arising from online textbook retailers met by physical college bookstores. The paper examines the implications of college students' purchasing behaviour when buying textbooks, how a specific corporate clientele is composed and the purchasing habits of these customers to the specific company in question. The company used as a practical example is a bookstore located on a university campus of Linköping University in Sweden. Data have been collected using a paper and pen survey of 200 students from Linköping University as well as conducting interviews with eight students and the Managing Director of the company in question.

Syfte: Vårt syfte med uppsatsen är att med hjälp av enkäter och de kriterier som finns i teorin undersöka hur långt de medverkande företagen har kommit i deras framgång gällande Customer Relationship Management. Metod: Vi har gjort en kvantitativ enkätundersökning där vi har tillfrågat 30 företag i Ronneby. Vi har sedan analyserat detta utifrån diagram som vi har fått fram i Excel. Slutsatser: De flesta företagen i Ronneby är bara i början av CRM och de kan med enkla medel komma mycket längre.

The purpose of this legal dogmatic Bachelor Thesis is to define the legal definition of ?a rescue service? and illustrate the division of responsibilities between national authorities and the municipalities with regards to the execution of emergency response operations.?A rescue service? means the emergency response actions that national and municipal authorities are legally obliged to provide to prevent or minimise injury to people and damage to property or the environment when emergencies occur or seem imminent. In the following cases a national authority is responsible for providing the requisite rescue service:1. Search and rescue (air) ? the Swedish Civil Aviation Authority is the responsible authority;2.

The aim of this study is, from a norm-critical approach, to find, investigate and analyse human representation in the visual culture of one preschool in order to understand if the children enrolled are represented or not. The research questions are: In what ways is there imagery of human representations in images and materials designed for play? What skin-colors and origins are dominant in the data collected?We carried out a qualitative study in the form of visual ethnography. This method allowed us to use a combination of different data collection tools such as photography and ethnographic field notes to collect our data. The photographs we took of images and material used for play, was then analysed through semiotic picture analysis.

The most dominating type of company in Sweden is the small-sized business and it usually lacks its own marketing department. The purpose of this paper was to analyze several small Swedish businesses which are specialized in different sectors of the Mechanic/Technology industry but they are similar in terms of having niched products and they are leading companies in the world. The objective was to do research about how small businesses work with marketing despite its lack of resources and capital.This survey has shown that customer contacts, customer relationships and especially for those investigated companies, it was very important to focus on globalization and product development in order to build a Point of Difference..

Uppsatsens syfte är att beskriva arbetsprocessen i ett event och visa på skillnader mellan de olika aktörernas synsätt. Den grundar sig på studier av två eventbyråer; en stor, marknadsledande och en liten, nystartad. I uppsatsens analys diskuteras framförallt skillnaderna mellan de som planerar eventet och de som genomför det. Här kan det ibland uppstå vissa spänningar. Utifrån två metaforer angrips problematiken de skilda synsätten och författarna diskuterar varför spänningarna kan uppstå, samt hur organisationen kan göra för att försöka undvika dem..

The aim of this thesis was to explore and analyze the sponsored debates on Newsmill, so called seminars. How does the sponsor use Newsmills seminars for marketing purposes? Who is allowed to write in Newsmills seminars?To answer these questions we used both a quantitative survey and a qualitative survey.To examine how the sponsors use Newsmills seminars for marketing purposes we conducted a qualitative analysis which included three of the eleven seminars - a total of 26 articles. We examined how the sponsors conveyed the picture of themselves and if the written content in Newsmills seminars contained any hidden marketing. We could see that the sponsor has a great deal of influence on the seminars and also used them to market their brand with hybrid messages.

Background and problem: Corporate Governance is a well-known phenomenon which has been the focus of plenty of research where the board of directors and the CEO have been regarded as important actors. What's affecting decisions regarding these actors has been debated whereas media has been pointed out of having an impact. To decide whether or not media can affect Corporate Governance have shown to be problematic whereas it exists divergent views regarding this. At the same time this relationship is more explored in other contexts than the swedish one, although this one is considered suitable for this. Consequently there is a motive for examining medias impact on Corporate Governance in Sweden. Purpose: The purpose of the thesis is to explain if media has an impact on Corporate Governance at an overall level.

This report is about changes in an organization. Changes is something that every organization sooner or later is bound to do. In many cases the changes leads to problems and conflicts. I have chosen to study one change process in the home help service of the municipality of Bollnäs. The change process I have chosen to study is about changes in the day-to-day work for the employees at the home help service.

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the conditions that prevail when companies put their marketing in social media with the purpose of creating a perception of the risks and opportunities it brings to businesses and ultimately how it may affect the corporate image and identity.Theories: The basis of the problem area are presented through a theoretical framework with the purpose of highlighting the notions of social media, communi- cation, marketing communication, groundswell, corporate identity and image.Methodology: To investigate the research questions this study adopted a qualitative approach in which the authors study the properties of a phenomenon in order to seek a deeper understanding of the problems we have presented. There is an exploratory approach to knowledge and the authors have chosen to conduct qualitative research interviews based upon three themes: driving forces, challenges and impacts.Conclusion: The study revealed that traditional models of communication are no longer applicable in social media. Companies are up for a challenge and must clarify their sole purpose when establishing communication in the social landscape. The general motivation for marketing in social media is making profit, however, building relationships is not a natural motive for most companies. The risks companies expe- rience is the exposure caused by social media and the study also reveals that this fear is firmly attached to their lack of knowledge of these new channels of communicat- ion and their primary areas of use which indicates that skilled employees plays a vi- tal role with their use of social media in their communication process.

Ur ett företagsekonomiskt perspektiv finns det ett stort intresse av att utveckla innovativa tjänster då forskning visar att det skapar hållbara konkurrensfördelar. Fastighetsföretag arbetar med tjänsteutveckling för att fylla sina fastigheter och arbetar tätt ihop med sina kunder där efterfrågan styr utvecklingsprocessen. Föreliggande studie testar Wang & Tsais (2012) tjänsteutvecklingsmodell där metoderna tjänstekartläggning, ?service blueprint? och ?axiomatic design? utgör verktyg för fastighetsföretag. Med dessa metoder ska företaget identifiera kundernas behov och leverera en ny tjänst som uppfyller både interna och externa krav.