During the latest 50 years, the Swedish porcelain tableware industry has gone from being rather successful to experience significant problems. Our empirical study attributes these problems to underlying changes in consumer buying behaviour, whereas current generation theory supports our findings. The younger generation has significantly different preferences compared to older generations, with less focus on quality and more focus on variability, and there is reason to believe that these findings also are applicable to other consumer purchases. The successful porcelain companies of tomorrow will be the ones that continuously can adapt to these and further changes in consumer buying behaviour..

A purchase decision can be seen as a multifaceted context that raises many unanswered questions. Understanding the consumer's evaluation of alternatives is complex and should be studied at a deeper rather than wider scale. There is a problem for retailers to understand how the consumer manages a purchase decision in a retail setting with durables goods that generates a higher effort. The aim is to describe the decision rules used by the consumer and how they are expressed in this context. A better understanding of which ones they use and how they are conveyed will help retailers to create effective marketing solutions that generate positive outcomes as increased profitability and customer satisfaction.

The modern beauty market is concentrated with intense competition where cosmetic brands fight to stay on top. A popular method in order to gain sales and increase margins is to influence existing customers to buy more with the use of suggestive selling. The purpose of this paper, was to further examine the different effects of suggestive selling with the use of complementary versus non- complementary goods in the form of customer satisfaction, customer view of the service encounter, as well as success in sales. In addition, the influence of the customer's purchase amount on the tendency to buy an extra product in a suggestive selling situation was examined. The study was conducted through the use of a field experiment with the support of surveys in 'The Body Shop'.

An organization must manage its resource consumption and material flows in order to satisfy the demand of its products as efficiently as possible. Managing of the aforementioned requires a balance between the organizations resources (such as the capability of distribution and production) and the market demand. According to Gardner (1990), an estimation of future demand is a necessity for maintaining the balance. An instrument that is used frequently to estimate future demand is demand forecasting. The demand forecasting practice has been thoroughly studied and a plethora of academic contributions exist on the topic.

Corporate Social ResponsibilityThis thesis intends to exam the strategic use of Corporate Social Responsibility within fifthteen different companies, classified/divided into three various industries. The aim is to compare the three different industries, to look for disparities and similarities in their use of CSR. The disseration looks into both variance and resemblance in the use of Corporate Social Responsibility between the companies within the same branch of trade and between the industries.The industries of intrestThe three industries that the study has focus on is consumer, manufacturing and service related industries. Where the consumer industry is classified as companies with direct sales towards private consumers, the physical citizen. The manufacturing industry is classified as companies that manufacture products but that does´nt sell their products directly to the regular consumer.

Consumer involvement in the product development process, co-creation, is being practiced by numerous companies. Previous research has investigated how consumer participation in co-creation affects consumer attitude. However, little is known about how co-creation affects the attitudes of the observervers of co-creation. The effect of observed co-creation on consumer attitude should be important when deciding whether to apply co-creation or not, as the observing consumers make up a larger part of the consumer collective than the participating consumers do. The paper at hand aims to investigate how observed co-creation affects consumer attitude and purchase intentions.

Risk analysis in connection with transportation of dangerous goods is associated with great uncertainty. In addition there are a number of specific problems that the risk analyst faces when risks associated with transportation of dangerous goods are to be analysed. In this report those problems and uncertainties are described.One of the most important conclusions in this report is that uncertainty analysis within risk analysis in connection to transportation of dangerous goods has to be made more effective..

Voluntary organisations provided the first consumer guidance in Sweden. The government'sinterest in the question started during the second world war and has ever since increased.Since the 1970's the local authorities, with support from the community, have played animportant roll in consumer policy work. Due to the economic recession of recent years theappropriation to consumer guidance work has been cut down. The work has been rationalisedand libraries have more frequently been used to spread consumer information.In Stockholm the municipal has been responsible for local consumer information since the1940's. Co-operation with the library of Stockholm has occurred in different forms.

Packaging has had little impact in marketing literature. Research has focused on a single transaction approach. Lately researchers are looking at packages as a tool for brand building purposes. Thus, the focus is moving towards a multiple transaction approach, where packages can affect the consumer also after the purchase. For a range of goods extrinsic cues has been shown to have stronger effect on consumers' evaluation than intrinsic ones.

This paper attempts to study the Swedish tariffs during the interwar period in order to asses the level of protectionism in Swedish tariff policy during the period. It is foremost the nominal tariffs that are studied, however an estimate of the effective rate of protection of the tariffs is also calculated for a number of goods. In order to asses the level of protectionism, the Swedish tariffs are also compared with Finnish tariff levels during the interwar period.The sample of Swedish tariffs that have been studied in this paper include the fifteen most important kinds of import goods and the fifteen most important kinds of export goods. The nominal tariff of each kind of goods have been weighted by their share of the total import value.The Swedish specific tariffs did not change much during the interwar period except for a few goods such as petroleum, coffee and automobiles. The fluctuation in nominal tariffs were in most cases the result of the steep fall in prices during the period.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of consumer generated advertising as a marketing tool to encourage online word of mouth. Subsequently, the researchers aim to examine if there are certain design factors in consumer generated advertising that influence the effectiveness of consumer generated advertising in encouraging online word of mouth. The study conducts a multiple case study of several consumer generated advertising campaigns. It consists of in-depth studies of these cases in combination with quantitative analyses of the encouraged word of mouth. The different cases are examined on several design factors that could possible increase the volume of encouraged word of mouth..

Breaking through the clutter and getting consumers? attention is a constant battle for marketers. Could consumer magazines be the solution to the problem? It is not a new marketing method but consumer magazines do not look like traditional marketing and they offer consumers value. Since these are qualities that could increase consumers? will to take part of commercial messages, it might be a method that deserves more attention.

For the last 50 years the amount of available Consumer goods has exploded in number, due to improvements in production and technology. The problem is that the overall sales of many categories are stagnant and retailers are unwilling to grant the categories more shelf space. Therefore many categories are crowded with products and hard for consumers to navigate in. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of an assortment reduction on several variables relating to assortment perceptions, customer satisfaction and store choice. The study was carried out as an experiment with 127 participants.

The buying decision process describes how the consumer makes a purchase decision through a rational process (Markin, 1979) and an understanding for how consumers make a purchase decision can according to Sands et al. (2010) be obtained by increased knowledge for the information search process (the second part of the buying decision process) before a purchase. Today?s society offers great opportunity to obtain information (Rahim & Clemens, 2012; Bawden & Robinson, 2009) and by that there are in other words good opportunities for a rational acting by the consumers. However, there are factors working against that consumers act rationally and seek information prior to their purchases primarily in the form of the concept of information overload (Bawden & Robinson, 2009) which claims that consumers are limited in their information search because there is too much information but also other factors such as lack of time (Wood & Neal, 2009) and ability to find information (Slegers et al.

Making accurate predictions of private consumption expenditures is a difficult task. This thesis examines if consumer confidence can be used to forecast consumption. Using regression analysis, the link between consumer confidence and private consumption expenditures is analyzed for Sweden between the years 1994 and 2005. Two different models are estimated. In the first model consumption is regressed only on consumer confidence, while model two is extended to contain more variables.