Bakgrund: Massturism och dess utveckling har lett till att människor blivit intresserade av mer än endast sol och bad. Detta har gett förutsättningar för utvecklingen av en ny gren inom turism, nämligen den alternativa turismen. För att kunna överleva på marknaden måste resebyråer med tematiska resor erbjuda det lilla extra och skapa mervärde med sina kunder. Detta kan exempelvis göras genom en tvåvägskommunikation och genom att bygga upp relationer både intern och extern i organisationen. Problemformulering: Vilka faktorer är viktiga för att temaresebyråer ska kunna överleva på marknaden och skapa mervärde för sina kunder? Syfte: Syftet med denna uppsats är att analysera och utvärdera sambandet mellan intern marknadsföring och återkommande kunder. Metod: Detta arbete har en kvalitativ ansats därför att det leder till en djupare förståelse av fenomenet som undersöks. Empirin består till största del av primärdata inhämtad via djupintervjuer med företag representanter. Teorier: De teoretiska ansatserna som anses relevanta för uppsatsen är Intern marknadsföring, Mervärdesteori, Lärande, Affärsidé, Kvalitet, Involveringsteori och Relation. Resultat och Slutsats: För att kunna överleva på den konkurrensutsatta marknaden bör ett företag skapa konkurrensfördelar genom att bygga upp relationer med sina kunder och göra de till lojala. Lojala, återkommande kunder kan ur ett långsiktigt perspektiv vara lönsamma för företaget. För att kunna dra nytta av sina lojala kunder bör företagen föra statistik över sina återkommande kunder och på så sätt få en tydlig bild över hur dessa kunder påverkar företagets överlevnad och lönsamhet.

How much is a brand worth? Brand equity is a measurement that reflects brand valuation, and is built through a brand’s various products, actions and activities. According to the Consumer Based Brand Equity (CBBE) model, the epitome of equity is achieved when the brand and the people are in a relationship, when the brand resonates with people. Until a few years back, most of this relationship played out in real life, but the arrival of new media and social media in particular is changing this. Brands are migrating into the realm of social media where people are socialising like never before. People move to social media, and so to maintain a relationship with them brands need to be there too. However, how do they go about engaging with people in these relatively unchartered waters? Is there a formula, a strategy that fits all? This study examines how brands work to maintain relationships with people in social media through looking at Social CRM and strategies that encourage participation and involvement. It aims to see whether there are differences in how different brand types manage their relationship with fans on the largest and most extensive social networking site, Facebook. Brands satisfy consumer needs and these influence consumer purchase decisions. The brand types investigated correspond to the different levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as it is the most cited and respected categorisation available. This means that a wide variety of brand are eligible for the investigation as long as their primary use is to satisfy one of the needs described by Maslow. The investigation takes the shape of a content analysis of 20 brands from four need categories (physiological, safety, behavioural, and ego), accompanied by a case study of one of these brands to illustrate the points made based on the quantitative data. What the data showed was that brands in general primarily focus on content rather than contact and collaboration in their engagement plans. Content is least time intensive and also easily involves the 90 percent of people that are categorises as lurkers. Two-way communication is encouraged but it varies between brand types. Brands within the safety need category were most open to two-way communication and also used it for customer service purposes. Collaboration is encouraged in social media but it is still used very sparsely, physiological brands being the most open to collaboration. However, the collaboration is more often cause-related than brand product/service-related.

The reason to return is a phenomenon which tells us that many people want to travel back to a destination they visited before. Even if there are changes in the society with the New tourist who seeks for the authentic, this essay is proving that there still is a dominance of repeat tourism and search for belonging and safety. That implication shows evidence that there still are remaining from old tourism about security with the destination and so on. Further, investigation tells us about the returning tourists, their driving forces and push-factors that create a will for tourists to return. Is it a question of how loyal tourists are to the destination, attitudes and/or tradition when planning the trip? We have made a survey that covers why tourists travel and what impacts are created during their decisions. Also included are the questions about the will of return and the reasons why. Having children proved to be a crucial part of the decision making process, where parents chose destinations out of the children-oriented places. Returning to a destination, on the other hand, is a product of safety-seeking together with a positive experience and beautiful surroundings, all weaved up to raison d'être - just to be.

During the 1980s and 1990s, commercial sponsorship grew with a rapid pace with an increase in worldwide spending from $2 billion in 1984 to $18.1 billion in 1997. Also, when the sponsorship market grew the interest amongst business researchers grew and finally became an own topic within business. Further, within marketing there was also a change occurring during the same time. It was an evolutionary paradigm shift from the marketing mix and the 4Ps to Relationship Marketing and the focus on long-term relationships. The marketing mix and the 4Ps had been the dominating model since the 1950s however when industries matured, market demand changed, competition increased and customers became more sophisticated and demanded more. Both the rapid growth within sponsorship and move to Relationship Marketing can mainly be explainedby the developments in Information Technology and globalization. However, despite the increasing interest sponsorship and relationship marketing separately,few researchers have tried to combine these two even though several researchers have challenged others. In 2003, Farrelly and Quester studied the relationships between the sponsor and the sponsored. The intentions of the researchers are to extend this research to the relationships between the sponsor and their customers. The purpose of this thesis is to explore how sponsors utilize sponsorship to build and maintain relationships with their customers. The intention is to create a foundation that can be later tested with the sponsors’ customers through a series of propositions. This study is done from the sponsors' perspective and in a B2B context. It is a qualitative research using six of the main sponsors as case studies for HV71, one of the largest ice hockey teams in Sweden. For the data collection the researchers used face-to-face interviews with managers from Husqvarna, Swedbank, Öhrlings PriceWaterhouseCoopers,Nybergs Bil, Ernst&Young and June Emballage. The researchers have identified four different ways how sponsors utilize sponsorship to build and maintain relationships with their customers. The sponsors use sponsorship to create meeting places outside the business office, increase communication, add value totheir offerings and predict customer needs. The goal is to increase trust and value because when they increase, the relationship between the sponsor and customer grows stronger.

Dagens företag, vars utbud alltmer karaktäriseras av tjänster, måste lära sig att anpassa sig till denna nya kundorienterade värld. Idag har kunderna stort utbud av varor och tjänster vilket innebär att företagen måste anstränga sig extra hårt för att ha nöjda och lojala kunder. Att ha nöjda kunder innebär inte automatiskt att dessa kunder är lojala. Kundlojalitet är viktigt för att företaget ska fungera på lång sikt. Syftet med uppsatsen är att se vilka slutsatser som kan dras om kundlojaliteten hos Bergslagens Sparbanks privatkunder i relation till hur nöjda de är. Vi vill även se hur vi kan utläsa den sanna kundlojaliteten hos Bergslagens Sparbanks privatkunder. Genom postenkäter och intervjuer sammanvävda med ett teoretiskt efterforskningsarbete har resultaten kommit fram. Ett abduktivt arbetssätt tillsammans med en kombinerad kvantitativ och kvalitativ undersökningsmetod har möjliggjort för författarna att uppnå det utforskande syfte uppsatsen utgått ifrån. Bergslagens Sparbanks privatkunder är i allmänhet nöjda med sin bank. Dock har det framkommit att det finns saker som banken kan förbättra.  Vi har dessutom sett mönster som visar på att det finnas både sann och falsk lojalitet bland bankens privatkunder. Åtskilliga kunder i Bergslagens Sparbank har haft banken sedan lång tid tillbaka, de flesta i elva år eller längre. Många har dessutom uppgett att familjen alltid har haft samma bank vilket innebär att ”traditionen” förts vidare till yngre generationer. Detta är ett tecken som visar på hur kunderna blir lojala. Vi visar att det finns ett samband mellan kunders attityder om Bergslagens Sparbank och deras kundlojalitet. / Today's businesses, whose range of product and services is increasingly being characterized by services, must learn to adapt to this new customer-driven world. Today, customers have wide selection of goods and services which means that companies need to strive extra hard to have satisfied and loyal customers. To have satisfied customers does not automatically mean that these customers are loyal. Customer loyalty is important for the company to work in the long run. The purpose with this research project is to see what conclusions can be drawn on the customer loyalty of Bergslagens Sparbank private customers, in relation to how satisfied they are. We also want to see how we can find the true customer loyalty of Bergslagens Sparbank private customers. By mail questionnaires and interviews interwoven with theoretical research the results have emerged. An abductive reasoning technique used with a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods has enabled the authors to achieve the exploratory purpose of this research project. Bergslagens Sparbank’s private customers are overall satisfied with their bank. However, it has become clear that there are things that the bank can improve. We have also seen the patterns that indicate that there is both true and false loyalty amongst the bank’s private customers. Many of the customers in Bergslagens Sparbank have been with the bank for a long time, most of them for eleven years or longer. Several of them have also stated that the family has always had the same bank, which means that it's a tradition that has passed on to younger generations. This is one of the signs that show how customers are becoming loyal. We show that customer attitudes towards Bergslagens Sparbank are affecting customer loyalty.

Syftet med denna uppsats är att studera om Handelsbankens vinstandelsstiftelse Oktogonen ger upphov till motiverade anställda samt om Oktogonen och bankens låga personalomsättning har ett samband. Studien bygger på en fallstudie. Datainsamling har skett genom främst intervjuer och tidigare forskning i form av böcker och artiklar. Resultatet har visat att viktiga faktorer för att uppnå en låg personalomsättning inom banken bland annat är en decentraliserad organisation samt att anställda känner en trygghet till sin arbetsgivare. Oktogonen påverkar i begränsad utsträckning, dock främst äldre medarbetares rörlighet. / The purpose of this paper is to study if Handelsbanken’s profit- sharing foundation Oktogonen creates motivated employees and if Oktogonen and the bank’s low employee turnover are connected. The study is based on a case study. The data comes primarily through interviews and previous research in books and articles. The results showed that key factors in achieving a low turnover of staff is a decentralized organization and that the employees feel a sense of security to their employer. Oktogonen affects a limited extent, but mainly the older employees mobility.

The goal of this dissertation is to provide a logically coherent and empirically grounded account of the relationships between collective communication, collective loyalties, and collective violence. Drawing on research from an array of disciplines, ranging from psychology to economics and sociology, I develop a new theoretical framework that I term "communicative structuralism." The central claim of this framework is that the communicative processes upon which the formation of collective identities and loyalties are based are structurally constrained in systematic ways. More specifically, it claims that public communicative structures, those which transmit synchronized messages and thus generate joint awareness of those messages amongst a collective audience, are central to the development of national, sub-national, and transnational symbolic allegiances because they create communities of shared experience and thereby generate symbolic touchstones which allow individuals to feel connected to a seemingly unified moral community. To test this theory, I collect data on the structural properties of the most prominent public communicative structures in the contemporary state system - those constituted by the mass media networks of newspapers, radios, and televisions - in 177 countries for the period 1945 - 1999. I then use this data to test the implications of the theory at two separate levels of analysis: (1) at the individual level the theory is tested using cross-national survey data on media exposure and state allegiance from over 30,000 respondents in 38 countries, and (2) at the state level the theory is tested using cross-national time-series data on civil conflict, identity fragmentation, and regime stability. I each case, the central finding is that mass media structures are fundamentally involved in generating the conditions for the formation of collective audiences (that is, audiences which are composed of members who are jointly aware of themselves as a collective). The dissertation demonstrates that such collective audiences, when constituted on a national scale by dense public communicative structures (i.e. mass media), make individuals more inclined to feel affective attachments to their country, and reduce the propensity to sociopolitical fragmentation thereby lessening the risk of large-scale civil conflict. In making this demonstration, the dissertation attempts to triangulate through the use of a wide variety of quantitative techniques, including multilevel hierarchical linear models, structural equation models, non-parametric tests of predictive accuracy, Bayesian model averaging, social network analysis, and agent-based computational simulations. I also ground the analysis in careful qualitative process-tracing of the disintegration of the Yugoslavian federation. / Dissertation

Nowadays, the luxury market is experiencing an intensive competition trend. Business is hard to survive from distinguish itself from other brands. Creating superior customer experience seems to be one of the vital objectives to remain competitive advantage in current retailing environments. This study was designed to investigate differences between levels of loyalty, perceived brand experience and retail experience, among shoppers from a luxury brand. Data for this study were collected from a convenience sample of 200 participants who were selected with personally experienced of a luxury brand. Descriptive statistics were compiled on data for all respondents. Data were analyzed by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to further assess the reliability of the scale. In addition, structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed to observe the relationships among the constructs and to test the remaining hypotheses. Results of the study demonstrated differences among brand and retail experience that suggested as drivers to afford experience to customer that successfully effectively affacting customer¡¦s emotion positively towards a significant luxury brand. Furthermore, the degree of expectation fulfillments generates satisfaction which, in turn intensifies intentions toward repatronage decision in the future. Therefore, both brand experience and retail experience embrace valuable feedback and feedforward to brand development strategies and assist in achieving a mutually beneficial commitment for the brand to gain the edge.

Recent tourism marketing development has highlighted the importance of customer participation. Owing to experience-seeking and use of internet, customers start to behave themselves as value co-creators, which offers greater opportunities for service providers and benefit customers themselves as well. Therefore, this study aims to identify the factors that contribute to customer participation and examine how customer participation effects relationship marketing in the tourism sector. The author proposes a model, in which communication, customer expertise, affective commitment and interactional justice are assumed to increase the extent to which customers participate in the service delivery. Furthermore, customer participation may increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. A survey was conducted based on travel agency service. In total 152 people who had experience working with travel agency participated in the survey. The testing results showed that the model is fully supported. Firstly, all antecedents, including communication, customer expertise, affective commitment and interactional justice, relate positively to customer participation. Secondly, customer participation enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty. Meanwhile, customer satisfaction has a positive effect on customer loyalty. Thus, the findings provide managers in the tourism with valuable insights that firms can increase their competitive advantage through enhancing customer participation.

The global shipments of smartphones will be more than four hundred fifty million, and it will overtake handset and become the mainstream in 2011. The fact is that there are more and more choices for customers to choose. It not only many brands, but also varieties of operating systems are provided with consumers.In this trend, is brand image still important factor that contributes to the consumers choosing the smartphones? For customers having had smartphones, how the brand image affects their loyalty? Therefore, this study attempts to find out the linear relationship between brand image and brand loyalty, In addition, it takes involvement and the operating systems into consideration. The research also intends to focus on whether the effects of the involvement adjust this or not and look for a difference of linear relationship between the two operating systems-android and ios. The scope of this research includes the customers owning smartphones in Taiwan. Moreover, the method of the study is sending on-line and paper questionnaires at the same time, and the number of the valid questionnaires is 261.In this study, brand image are divided into three perspectives by factorial analysis, functional benefits, symbolic benefits, experiential benefits. Brand loyalty consists of behavioral loyalty and attitudinal loyalty. The involvement is composed of importance, symbolic value, and risk.The research uses regression analysis to verify the linear relationship between brand image and brand loyalty. Furthermore, put brand image, brand loyalty, involvement into the regression analysis, and through multiple stepwise regression analysis to find out the factors which contribute to linear relationship. The result reveals that there is a linear relationship between the brand image and brand loyalty. In addition, linear relationship between different operating systems is also different, and especially the functional brand influences significantly on brand loyalty.