Leprosy (or Hnasen’s Disease), is a major problem in Brazillian public health not only for its prevalence rate of cases but also for its chronic development. Futhermore, when the disease is not treated, it may cause injuries and deformities. The objective of developing this research was due to permanent cases of this ailment in Nossa Senhora do Socorro, a small town in Sergipe. This city ranks in the third position concerning the incidence of the disease in the state of Sergipe. The public heath institutions claim that prejudice and exclusion of part of the population to have access diagnosis and treatment even in the beginning of the disease have been the main obstacles to eliminate leprosy. The general purpose of the research was to find out and analyze the leprosy patients in order to know the sufferers’ profile in terms of socioeconomic aspects, information about the disease, ways of treatment and the impact of the disease in the leprosy patients’ everyday life. The methodological procedures combined documentary analysis and semistructured interview. The group involved in the research was maily women still working with low family’s income and poor schooling, bad jobs. It is important that these patients didn’t have correct information about either the diagnosis or the beginning of the treatment, for they ended up mixing up the symptoms of leprosy with other diseases, sometimes they couldn’t even notice them. Although they had undergone the treatment, some had wrong interpretation and consequently stopping the treatment. In relation to the impacts in the sufferers’ everyday life, it could be noticed negative repercussion in their self image, willingness of occultation of the disease and the perception of healing as the elimination of all symptoms and sequels. It can be concluded through the research that prevention, diagnosis and treatment can’t be limited to health area only, but it is important to mention the necessity of involving health, education and environment. Last but not least, it is worth mentioning enviromental education, as well as taking into consideration the patients’ insights and their living conditions to promote the prevention and treatment of the disease. / A hanseníase constitui-se um problema de saúde pública no Brasil, na medida em que apresenta altas prevalências, além de evolução crônica, e, quando não tratada, pode causar lesões e deformidades. O interesse em desenvolver esta pesquisa foi instigado a partir da permanência da doença no Município de Nossa Senhora do Socorro, o qual ocupa o terceiro lugar quanto a incidência da doença no Estado de Sergipe. As instituições públicas de saúde alegam que o preconceito e a exclusão de parte da população quanto ao acesso, ao diagnóstico e ao tratamento em sua fase inicial, são os principais obstáculos para a eliminação da hanseníase. A pesquisa teve como objetivo geral levantar e analisar as percepções que os portadores de hanseníase tinham sobre a doença, como objetivos específicos, caracterizar os portadores de hanseníase no Município; detectar que tipo de informações têm sobre a doença, as formas de tratamento e os impactos da mesma no seu cotidiano. Os procedimentos metodológicos combinaram análise documental e entrevista semi-estruturada. O roteiro de entrevista constou de levantamento de dados referentes à situação sócio-econômica dos participantes. Outras questões buscaram levantar conhecimentos e percepções sobre a doença, o tratamento e modificações ocorridas na vida dessas pessoas após a descoberta da doença. O grupo pesquisado apresentou predominância do sexo feminino, baixa escolaridade e renda familiar, sub-empregos e desemprego. A respeito de informações sobre a doença, os resultados revelaram que esse grupo não as possuía de modo claro antes do diagnóstico e início do tratamento. Quanto ao tratamento, embora todos tivessem feito, ocorreram interpretações errôneas sobre o mesmo. Em relação aos impactos na vida cotidiana, detectou-se repercussões negativas na auto-imagem, desejo de ocultamento da doença e a percepção da cura como a eliminação total de sinais e sequelas. A pesquisa concluiu que a prevenção, diagnóstico e tratamento não podem ficar restritos à área de saúde, mas devem-se estabelecer relações entre saúde, educação e meio ambiente. Defende-se também a utilização dos princípios da educação ambiental, atentando-se para os aspectos da percepção dos portadores de hanseníase e suas condições de vida, com vistas a promover a prevenção e tratamento da doença.

La presente investigación plantea la necesidad de identificar los cambios que podrían o no darse en el proceso de compra tradicional frente a las nuevas generaciones que están por venir, esto impulsado principalmente por el comportamiento de la Generación Z. Para ello, este trabajo tiene como base una cercana investigación del público objetivo en torno a su comportamiento, a cómo escogen y compran diferentes marcas, y a la forma en que éstos podrán ser fidelizados por las empresas que aplican marketing 3.0, de lo cual se habla en el marco teórico en el capítulo 1. En el capítulo 2, se tratan los objetivos y la hipótesis principal de la investigación, la cual es: El consumidor de la Generación Z, es considerado como nativo digital y mantiene contacto directo con la tecnología, la cual representa un papel importante en su día a día. Es por ello, que es posible que el comportamiento de la Generación Z, como consumidores, influya en la transición del proceso de compra tradicional a uno más online. La metodología empleada para la presente investigación, que se realizó en el capítulo 3, tuvo dos partes complementarias entre sí; la primera de carácter cualitativa exploratoria, la cual abarcó, en primer lugar, dos entrevistas a profundidad a expertos en temas de marketing digital y comportamiento del consumidor, las cuales fueron tomadas como base para la realización de dos focus group. El primer focus group fue dirigido a jóvenes de edades comprendidas entre 13 a 19 años y el segundo a padres de familia de esta generación. Por último, se realizó una investigación cuantitativa concluyente que abarcó la realización de 384 encuestas presenciales al target. Este nuevo segmento es nativo digital y generador de nuevo contenido, además muestra nuevos patrones de comportamiento que lo diferencian de generaciones antecesoras, por dicha razón analizar y estudiar estas características conductuales es fundamental para evaluar si es que el proceso tradicional de compra podría sufrir cambios en un futuro no muy lejano. Lo cual impactaría en el sector retail, tal como el comportamiento de esta nueva generación impactaría en otros rubros como el educativo, psicológico, laboral, etc, tratado en el capítulo 4. Como resultado de la investigación se identifican las características más relevantes del comportamiento del consumidor de la Generación Z, lo cual permite conocer sus preferencias en relación a cómo éstos consumen diferentes marcas. Finalmente, como resultado del análisis realizado en el capítulo 5, se presentan los hallazgos y recomendaciones en relación al posible cambio del proceso de compra tradicional impulsado por el comportamiento de esta nueva generación. / The present investigation raises the need to identify the changes that might or not be given in the process of traditional purchase opposite to the new generations that are about to come, this is stimulated principally for the behavior of the Generation Z. For it, this document is based in the nearby investigation of the target concerning about his behavior in order to know how they choose and buy different brands and in what way they will be able to be fidelize through companies that applies marketing 3.0, which is discussed in the theoretical framework in the chapter 1. The chapter 2 contains the objectives and the main hypothesis of the investigation, which is: The Generation Z consumer is considered as a digital native and maintains a direct contact with the technology, which plays an important role in its day a day. That is why it is possible that the behavior of Generation Z, as consumers, influence the transition from the traditional buying process to one more online. The methodology used for the present investigation, which is in the chapter 3, shows two complementary parts; the qualitative exploratory, which include two depth interviews to experts in topics of digital marketing and consumer behavior which were taken as a base for the accomplishment of two focus group that were performed as a consequence of that first investigation. The first focus was aimed at young people aged 13 to 19 years and the second, to parents of this generation. Finally, a conclusive quantitative investigation was carried out, covering 384 face-to-face surveys. This new segment is a digital native and generator of new content, and also shows new patterns of behavior that differentiate it from the ancestral generations, therefore, analyzing and studying these behavioral characteristics is fundamental to evaluate if the buying process could undergo changes in the not too distant future. This would impact in the retail sector, as the behavior of this new generation would impact other items such as educational, psychological, labor, etc, discussed in the chapter 4. As a result of the research the most relevant characteristics of Generation Z consumer behavior are identified, which allows to know their preferences in relation to how they consume different brands. Finally, as a result of the analysis, presented in the chapter 5, we present the findings and recommendations regarding the possible change in the traditional purchasing process driven by the behavior of this new generation. / Trabajo de Suficiencia Profesional

Customer calls serve as a valuable source of feedback for financial service providers, potentially containing a wealth of unexplored insights into customer questions and concerns. However, these call data are typically unstructured and challenging to analyze effectively. This thesis project focuses on leveraging Topic Modeling techniques, a sub-field of Natural Language Processing, to extract meaningful customer insights from recorded customer calls to a European financial service provider. The objective of the study is to compare two widely used Topic Modeling algorithms, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and BERTopic, in order to categorize and analyze the content of the calls. By leveraging the power of these algorithms, the thesis aims to provide the company with a comprehensive understanding of customer needs, preferences, and concerns, ultimately facilitating more effective decision-making processes.  Through a literature review and dataset analysis, i.e., pre-processing to ensure data quality and consistency, the two algorithms, LDA and BERTopic, are applied to extract latent topics. The performance is then evaluated using quantitative and qualitative measures, i.e., perplexity and coherence scores as well as in- terpretability and usefulness of topic quality. The findings contribute to knowledge on Topic Modeling for customer insights and enable the company to improve customer engagement, satisfaction and tailor their customer strategies.  The results show that LDA outperforms BERTopic in terms of topic quality and business value. Although BERTopic demonstrates a slightly better quantitative performance, LDA aligns much better with human interpretation, indicating a stronger ability to capture meaningful and coherent topics within company’s customer call data.

The management and implementation of unique resources contribute to the creation of a sustainable competitive advantage that has a positive impact on the owner of the resource’s profits. Customer relationship management becomes very important because customers with their own personal devices and options such as cloud computing, social media and mobility have converged into a renewed driving force expecting organisations to remember their experiences. These experiences should not been stored in separate channels or silos. With a customer resource management system organisations could have the opportunity to get better insights of customers and derive better business value. Customer data should be managed by organisations just like any other corporate asset. Because of the importance of customer data and the critical advantage it creates, organisations see an effective customer data management strategy as an important cornerstone of a customer relationship management strategy. A system should have the ability to provide accurate, timely, and reliable data and information that can tailor customer capabilities that could influence an organisation’s performance. Big data is an extension of customer relationship management and big data customer relationship management initiatives will require integration and analysis of both structured and unstructured data to identify the most relevant insights of a customer and determine the most appropriate customer action. Knowledge management should be applied to solve business problems to support current work styles and make better use of social software. The biggest reason for organisations to address knowledge management is the impact of fast retrieval of the right information to ensure customer satisfaction. The role of information technology is to enable information management and transform the organisation to business excellence. Information technology is a powerful tool for defining, organising, and building knowledge assets within an organisation. Information technology is developing fast and organisations can apply technology to enhance their competence which showed a positive correlation in a customer focused approach. Together with customer resource management, market resource management could be used to support more customer centric strategies with fewer resources. Management of customer resources using information technology could develop significant customer relationships and improve an organisation’s competitive advantage in the market. Exploratory research found that in selected South African business schools the use of a customer resource management system to analyse the growing volume and variety of customer information can create better customer insights. The customer resource management system supports marketing efforts and can create new business by gaining new customers. / MBA, North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

The management and implementation of unique resources contribute to the creation of a sustainable competitive advantage that has a positive impact on the owner of the resource’s profits. Customer relationship management becomes very important because customers with their own personal devices and options such as cloud computing, social media and mobility have converged into a renewed driving force expecting organisations to remember their experiences. These experiences should not been stored in separate channels or silos. With a customer resource management system organisations could have the opportunity to get better insights of customers and derive better business value. Customer data should be managed by organisations just like any other corporate asset. Because of the importance of customer data and the critical advantage it creates, organisations see an effective customer data management strategy as an important cornerstone of a customer relationship management strategy. A system should have the ability to provide accurate, timely, and reliable data and information that can tailor customer capabilities that could influence an organisation’s performance. Big data is an extension of customer relationship management and big data customer relationship management initiatives will require integration and analysis of both structured and unstructured data to identify the most relevant insights of a customer and determine the most appropriate customer action. Knowledge management should be applied to solve business problems to support current work styles and make better use of social software. The biggest reason for organisations to address knowledge management is the impact of fast retrieval of the right information to ensure customer satisfaction. The role of information technology is to enable information management and transform the organisation to business excellence. Information technology is a powerful tool for defining, organising, and building knowledge assets within an organisation. Information technology is developing fast and organisations can apply technology to enhance their competence which showed a positive correlation in a customer focused approach. Together with customer resource management, market resource management could be used to support more customer centric strategies with fewer resources. Management of customer resources using information technology could develop significant customer relationships and improve an organisation’s competitive advantage in the market. Exploratory research found that in selected South African business schools the use of a customer resource management system to analyse the growing volume and variety of customer information can create better customer insights. The customer resource management system supports marketing efforts and can create new business by gaining new customers. / MBA, North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

Es stellt einen bedeutsamen Marktvorteil für ein Unternehmen dar, abschätzen zu können, welche Produktidee auf dem Markt erfolgreich sein könnte und welche scheitern wird. Auf Basis psychologischer Erkenntnisse aus verschiedenen Forschungsfeldern kann die Marktforschung für Innovationen bereits in frühen Entwicklungsstadien wichtige Hinweise auf das Erfolgspotential eines neuen Produktes geben. Diese Arbeit beleuchtet zwei Aspekte der psychologischen Marktforschung für Innovationen genauer: Wie groß sind Bewertungsunterschiede zwischen Personen, die sich in gewissen Personeneigenschaften unterscheiden und welchen Einfluss hat die Präsentation einer Innovation auf die anschließende Bewertung? Zwei Studien wurden durchgeführt, um diese Fragen zu adressieren. Die Ergebnisse zeigen kaum Einfluss der Personeneigenschaften auf die Innovationsbewertung. Bezüglich der unterschiedlichen Präsentationsart ergeben sich keine signifikanten Unterschiede zwischen Bild- und Videopräsentationen. Wird die Innovation jedoch real erlebt, wird sie signifikant passender, besser bedienbar und begeisternder wahrgenommen. Die Implikationen für weitere Forschung und für die Praxis der Marktforschung werden diskutiert. / Early knowledge on what may and what may not be market success in the future is a key success factor for any company. Taking into account findings from different fields of psychology, market research in early development stages can provide important insights on the potential of a new product. Two aspects of psychological market research for innovations are studied in depth: To what extent do people with different personal attributes differ in their evaluation of an innovation? What are the effects of different presentation formats like pictures and videos when an innovation is evaluated? Two studies are conducted to attend to these questions. The results show little evidence that personal attributes influence the innovation evaluation. With regard to presentation format, only small evaluation differences are found between picture and video presentations. However, when the product is actually experienced, it is perceived to be more compatible, easier to use, and more exciting. Options for further research and practical implications are discussed.

For a retailer, who has a close and everyday contact with its customers, understanding the customers can be of benefit if they know how to use the information in the right way. One way of using the customer is to integrate customers when developing new services, to enhance the possibility of the new service gaining market acceptance. Customer insight, Omnichannel retailing and Big Data are areas that recently have caught the interest of retailers. The latter two are of interest as these provide retailers with better possibilities of gaining customer insight, by taking the opportunities to observe the customers’ virtual footsteps to a whole new level. This thesis is a study made with the market research company Nepa as employer of the thesis, in order to develop their B2B offer with end-customer integration. Why and how customers are integrated were further studied through the frame of reference. The factors that were chosen to describe from a theoretical standpoint how customers can be integrated were type of integration, role of the customer, type of customer and timing of the integration. The underlying factors that were chosen to answer why retailers choose different alternatives among the above mentioned factors were market orientation, service/goods dominant logic, environmental uncertainty and market maturity. The study was made with a qualitative, positivistic approach using a collective case study. The case study is a good way to be able to answer both how and why-questions and was therefore chosen as method. By investigating multiple cases and performing a cross case analysis the authors were able to draw more generalizable conclusions. Five retailers took part in the study and for each of these a developed service was chosen as case for investigation. By doing low structured interviews using a method called story-telling, the authors let the respondents from each company speak freely about the chosen case, and that information could then be analyzed. The conclusions of the study concern the different ways retailers choose to integrate customers and the reasons they do it in different ways. A company’s market orientation affects if and what type of customer integration is used in the idea-generating phases. The degree of market orientation also affects the amount of occasions and what type of customer integration is used in the execution-oriented phases. Retailers’ turbulent technology environment has influenced their general perception of risk and the risk of unacceptance with the specific project. This results in that a company can initially integrate customers proactively to let them guide the company or the company can consider customer integration to be secondary. Retailers generally are guided by a goods dominant logic which leads to them not choosing to integrate the customers in active roles in the innovation process. Instead, the retailers combine different integration techniques to gain some of the advantages that active customer could have brought. This is also connected to the retailers wanting to get quickly through the early phases of the process and instead use agile development after the launch of the service. The retailers do not choose different types of customers for integration, but the combination of integration techniques can still provide them with some of the characteristics of the more knowledgeable customer.

The thesis presents an evaluation of the Facebook page of the Italian non-profit organization Oxfam Italia from November 2013 to March 2014. The research’s aim is to analyze the community which follows the organization, how this community interacts with it and how the moderators of the page communicate with its followers. The research aims also to find ways to increase Oxfam Italia’s performance on Facebook. The theoretical framework focuses on non-profit marketing and its peculiarities, Social Media Marketing and notions such as engagement and brand community. The methods used in the research consist in data mining and content analysis. Data have been gathered from Facebook Insights and through the issuing of FQL queries from the Facebook Graph API. The research found out that Oxfam has more female followers than male (62% vs 36,5%), the age range of them is 25-44 years. Oxfam’s presence, in particular, is very rooted in the region of Tuscany (where its headquarter is). Facebook followers showed a very good attitude toward the organization, even though criticisms are common, and Oxfam used its social media presence mainly to update the followers concerning ongoing activities and to urge to on-line activism. The users’ favourite engagement method was “liking” photographic contents.

Forskningen grundar sig på att det finns en kunskapslucka i utvärderingar av företag som praktiskt implementerar arbetsmetoden Scrum. Det finns tydliga samband mellan kulturen i en organisation och hur denna kan effektivt och framgångsfullt implementera ett agilt arbetssätt (Ilvari, Ilvari, 2011). Forskaren gjorde en semistrukturerad intervjuform med 7 medarbetare. Syftet utvärderar implementering av Scrum som metod samt hur organisationen jobbar med kundinsikter. Resultatet visar att en majoritet av medarbetarna upplever ett högre engagemang och större motivation tack vare det nya arbetssättet. Att sätta kunden i centrum är ett arbete som kräver stort fokus och då inte minst från organisationens ledare. Här har organisationens ledare varit engagerade. Några förbättringspunkter identifierats i forskningen, som till exempel att organisationen behöver bli bättre på att systematiskt mäta och sprida kundinsikter, att utveckla arbetet med att bli en lärande organisation samt att ledningen behöver hitta ett sätt att strategiskt jobba med organisationens kultur. / The research is based on the fact that there is a knowledge gap in evaluations of companies that implement the working method Scrum. There is a connection between the culture of an organization and how it can effectively and successfully implement an agile approach (Ilvari, Ilvari, 2011). The researcher did a semi-structured interview with employees. The purpose of the study was to evaluate the implementation of Scrum as a method and how the organization works with customer insights. The result shows that a majority of employees experience a higher commitment and greater motivation thanks to the new way of working. Putting the customer at the centre is something that requires a lot of focus. And much from the organisation's leaders. Here the organisation's leaders have been highly involved. Some improvement points were also identified in the research, such as systematically measuring and disseminating customer insights, developing the work of becoming a learning organization, and That the management does not work strategically with the organisation's culture. / <p>2019-08-23</p>

This report deals with the creation of Habit's website, which is aimed at private customers, habitsapp.eco. Habits is a small company in Gothenburg and they want to help companies, organizations and individuals to reduce their environmental impact in an easy and fun way. They have developed a web-based tool for this that will be launched in the fall of 2020 and the website created will be their "face out" for the tool aimed at private individuals. The report describes the steps and tools that were made and used to create this site. User stories have been made to get to know the user and identify their needs, sketches of the website have been made to easily illustrate how the site would look like and a sitemap has been created to know which pages the project should contain. How the creation has been done from HTML to Twig and the functionality behind things like menu, questions and answers section, support for multiple languages etc. Is brought up. In addition to this, tests have also been done by both me and my supervisor at Habits. Various tools have been used to ensure that the load time remains within an approved framework and tools such as the WAVE Evaluation Tool have been used to ensure the availability of the site. In the end, there is a finished product that fulfills Habit's purpose and hopefully is representative of their service and can draw users into their web-based tools. / Denna rapport behandlar skapandet av Habits webbplats som riktar sig till privatkunder, habitsapp.eco. Habits är ett mindre företag i Göteborg och de vill hjälpa företag, organisation och privatpersoner att minska sin miljöpåverkan på ett lätt och roligt sätt. De har utvecklat ett webbaserat verktyg för detta som kommer lanseras hösten 2020 och webbplatsen som skapas kommer vara deras ”ansikte utåt” för det verktyg som är riktat till privatpersoner. I rapporten gås det igenom vilka steg och verktyg som gjorts och använts för skapandet av denna webbplats. User stories har gjorts för att lära känna användaren och identifiera deras behov, skisser över webbplatsen har gjorts för att enkelt kunna illustrera hur webbplatsen skulle se ut och en sitemap har skapats för att veta vilka sidor projektet skall innehålla. Hur skapandet har gjorts från HTML till Twig och funktionalitet bakom saker som meny, frågor och svar-sektionen, stöd för flera språk mm. Tas upp. Utöver detta har också tester gjorts av både mig och min handledare på Habits. Olika verktyg för att säkerställa att laddningstiden håller sig inom en godkänd ram har gjorts och verktyg som WAVE Evaluation Tool har använts för att säkerställa webbplatsens tillgänglighet. I slutändan finns en färdig produkt som fyller Habits syfte och förhoppningsvis är representativ för deras tjänst och kan dra in användare till deras webbaserade verktyg.