Purpose The purpose of this thesis is to explore why and how B2B-companies use podcasts as a marketing tool and evaluate how it canfunction together with other marketing strategies. Problematization Digital content marketing is an increasingly popular marketingstrategy within B2B. There is however a large content saturationonline, this puts pressure on organizations having to increase theirmarketing creativity and finding alternative means to stand outfrom the crowd while at the same time staying within theirmarketing budget. Podcast marketing is a form of content marketingbeing fairly untapped territory and with little research dedicatedtowards it, however being the fastest growing medium it is of highinterest to better understand its marketing potential and how toutilize it. Methodology A qualitative case study with an iterative approach. The empiricalfindings derive from semi structured interviews with five selectedcase companies and a podcast producer. Conclusion Why B2B companies use podcasting as a marketing tool variessomewhat, the five main reasons identified are cost and timeefficiency, active listening, building relationships, branding andemployer branding. Some view podcasting in a strategic sense first,while others seem to use podcasting just as much for their ownenjoyment as they do for strategic purposes. There are challenges inregard to measuring success. However, those challenges do notappear to be very problematic as costs are low. Reaching the rightpeople is more important than reaching the masses. Contribution This study adds to existing research within the field of B2B content marketing by exploring podcasts as a marketing tool.

The aim of this Master´s thesis is to analyze a company e-commerce, to take a think about what it has brought to the company and withal suggest some instruments for increasing the salability and improve the communication between individual distribution channels so they would be more motivated for cooperation within this company. The thesis is divided into several chapters where we can find general knowledge about the commerce via the Internet, single kind of the e-commerce and also the legal aspects connected with that. The analytic part will introduce us the concrete knowledge about the company and marketing possibilities on the Internet for that company.

Research Questions: How do consulting companies work to strengthen the brand's structure?What impact does brand equity and its components have on consulting firms? Purpose: The purpose of this study is to contribute with new knowledge as well as increase the understanding of brand equity and how its components contribute to strengthening the consultancy's brand. The study also aims to explore how companies create competitive advantages in a constantly evolving market.                                                                                                                              Method: Qualitative method with four semi-structured interviews. Conclusion: The result of this study show that the consulting companies are activelyworking with three aspects within the company in order to strengthen the brand and its structure. All aspects are about the company being innovative, working on and completing internal factors that develop the corporate culture and its values for them to be reflected externally as well as how the companies meet the customers’ needs in terms of results and performance. The result also show that the researched consulting companies work around strengthening the brand structure by taking into account of aspects that also are found in Keller’s Customer Based Brand Equity Model (CBBE Model). / Frågeställning: Hur arbetar konsultföretag med att stärka varumärkets uppbyggnad?Vilken inverkan har brand equity och dess komponenter på konsultföretag? Syfte: Syftet med denna undersökning är att med ny kunskap bidra samt öka förståelsen om brand equity och hur dess komponenter bidrar till att stärka konsultföretagens varumärke. Studien ämnar även till att undersöka hur företagen kan skapa konkurrensfördelar i en ständigt utvecklande marknad. Metod: Studien är av kvalitativ metod där fyra semistrukturerade intervjuer utförts i syfte att besvara forskningsfrågan, som vidare analyserades genom tematisk metod. Slutsats: Resultaten av denna studie visar att konsultföretagen aktivt arbetar kring tre aspekter i syfte till att stärka varumärket och dess uppbyggnad. Samtliga handlar om att företaget ska vara innovativt, att bearbeta och komplettera interna faktorer som utvecklar företagskulturen och dess värderingar för dessa att speglas externt och om hur företagen uppfyller kundernas behov i form av resultat och prestationer. Resultaten visar även på att de undersökta konsultföretagen arbetar kring att stärka varumärkesuppbyggnaden genom att de tar hänsyn till aspekter som också återfinns i Keller´s Customer Based Brand Equity Model.

ABSTRACTPurpose: The purpose of this study is to assess and examine the nature and scope of brandingduring exportation within SMEs in the B2B context. The findings of this study will increaseknowledge of the relative challenges that SMEs are faced with when it comes to branding duringexportation and how it influences their export performance.Research Methodology: This research uses an exploratory approach with a qualitative methodfor understanding the in-depths of the subject matter because it is mostly appropriate for smallsamples, while its outcomes are not measurable and quantifiable.Research Findings: This research points out to the main challenges faced by SMEs in the B2Bduring exportation from this study which are; lack of resources, time and talents for brandmanagement activities. Hence, showing that previous research on branding has in SMEs has beenlacking in the Marketing literature.Contributions: It contributes to the branding literature by comprehensively identifying andsynthesizing relevant studies on B2B SMEs during exportation which makes a call for theadvancement of theory by suggesting the need to examine more issues raised in different economiccontexts, as well as business sectors.Research Type: Academic ResearchKey Words: Branding, Business-to-business sector, Exportation, Small and medium sizedenterprises.

Business-to-business customer loyalty management is an essential and long-standing theme in business research and practice. Loyal clients are of great importance within Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), as the business model relies strongly on long-term business relationships, e.g. due to subscription models. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, there is no study on how to design loyalty initiatives used in business-to-business SaaS relationships yet. Therefore, our thesis asks the question “How can loyalty initiatives be designed to improve the loyalty of SaaS business clients?”. By applying a qualitative research methodology with multi-case studies, we were able to investigate the status-quo of customer loyalty management by looking at the vendor side and then analysing the perception of loyalty initiatives, with respect to the client’s perspective. A broad number of in-depth empirical data was collected in semi-structured interviews conducted with employees of six SaaS vendor firms and seven of their clients. As we used an abductive approach, we were able to compare our findings with the existing literature and extend previous theory. Our interview findings were then clustered into eight dimensions, which were based on the customer lifecycle, and various initiatives have been assigned to them. All initiatives included several actions performed by the vendors, which were then classified into three categories, according to how important it was perceived by their clients. We concluded our research with the ‘Design Guide for Loyalty Initiatives’ that summarises our findings and provides an overview for SaaS vendors to review and adjust their initiatives. Hence, we deliver valuable insights for SaaS vendors to gain a deeper understanding of their clients’ needs and to, in turn, prioritise their performed loyalty actions and allocate their budget accordingly.

Many companies have exploited the power of brand equity in B2C markets as a source of competitive advantage. The trend in B2B, however, seems to be slightly different where many decision makers still believe that branding is not relevant to their business as it is to B2C. This paper investigates the role of brand equity in B2B businesses and shows how long-term investment in brand equity can change the rules of the game radically in favor of those B2B companies who have invested in their brand with a "holistic" approach which conform the overall strategy of the company. Caterpillar Inc. has been chosen as the case study and the role of its brand equity in its superior performance over its competitor, Komatsu Ltd, is investigated. The qualitative part of the research analyses the brand associations and the roles that these associations together with other brand elements play for Caterpillar and its customers. The quantitative part investigates two particular areas of recovery from market difficulties and efficiency in market communications and proves the role of higher brand equity in superior performance in recovery from market difficulties and marketing communications efficiency. The results are then tested further on the second case study which compares Intel to AMD. The results also open up new lines for further research on the subject both in depth and breadth where suggestions are made for generalizability of the research as well as determining the role of brand equity in companies' performances more precisely.

In the pre-relationship exploration stage of a business-to-business (B2B) relationship, firms find it difficult to evaluate other parties because of the prevalence of information asymmetry. Firms must make informed decisions, otherwise, they end up in a contentious long-term relationship, which adversely affects the performance of both sides. While majority research on B2B relationships is focused in the post-relationship phase, very little has been done to identify strategies that firms can adopt to signal their firm characteristics in the pre-relationship phase. This is important, as such signals can help firms make informed purchase decisions by cutting through the information asymmetry. Also, sending the right signals can help firms extract a price premium from their prospective partners, contributing positively to their bottom line. Therefore, this dissertation consists of three essays with the objective to (i) identify positioning strategies that sellers can use to signal firm characteristics and test which elements of firm characteristics enable them to extract a price premium (ii) identify branding strategies that sellers can use to signal firm characteristics and test which elements of firm characteristics enable them to extract a price premium (iii) investigate signals that affect firm performance.

Nowadays, in Sweden there are several models for recruiting job seekers suchas recruiting campaigns, paid memberships at one or more job platforms,utilizing job APIs and others. New technologies are constantly being developedto meet both job seekers' and job providers' increasing demands. The majorityof jobseekers use the internet to find suitable jobs. Job seekers look for jobs inindividual companies' websites and through job marketplaces platforms wherejob advertisements are published. The majority of existing job marketplacesrequire companies to manually register their jobs. Consequently, this incurscosts and efforts on the companies. To address this challenge, in this thesis,we present an approach that comprises an architecture and a process whichserve as a foundation for the design of an automated job marketplace. Tovalidate the feasibility of our approach, we developed a prototype andconducted experiments to evaluate the performance and scalability of theapproach.

The rapid growth of technological infrastructure has changed the way companies do business. Subscription based services are one of the outcomes of the ongoing digitalization, and with more and more products and services to choose from, customer churning has become a major problem and a threat to all firms. We propose a machine learning based churn prediction model for a subscription based service provider, within the domain of financial administration in the business-to-business (B2B) context. The aim of our study is to contribute knowledge within the field of churn prediction. For the proposed model, we compare two ensemble learners, XGBoost and Random Forest, with a single base learner, Naïve Bayes. The study follows the guidelines of the design science methodology, where we used the machine learning process to iteratively build and evaluate the generated model, using the metrics, accuracy, precision, recall, and F1- score. The data has been collected from a subscription-based service provider, within the financial administration sector. Since the used dataset is imbalanced with a majority of non- churners, we evaluated three different sampling methods, that is, SMOTE, SMOTEENN and RandomUnderSampler, in order to balance the dataset. From the results of our study, we conclude that machine learning is a useful approach for prediction of customer churning. In addition, our results show that ensemble learners perform better than single base learners and that a balanced training dataset is expected to improve the performance of the classifiers.

The growth of business-to-business auctions presents the quality-focused business organization with many opportunities and some serious challenges. In this context, the absence of a well-designed organizational e-business auction-based strategy has the potential to promote business practices which may erode organizational quality gains. This article presents a conceptual open system approach designed to improve the quality focus of business-to-business auctions practices. The open system approach advocated in this article is quality focused and supply-chain sensitive.