Traditionally speaking, some firms believe that great brand awareness will affect consumers¡¦ purchasing intention and bring much more profit in returns. Hence, a large number of entrepreneurs are spending a tremendous amount of capital on enhancing their brands and brand awareness but they often ignore the importance of word-of-mouth communication on internet. Recently, the internet has become much more popular and common than decades ago and such channel has changed consumers¡¦ purchasing habits. In fact, there are more consumers who share their experience on those products and services that they have used through internet. Furthermore, there are also more consumers who use internet to receive the information that they need for specific products and services. Thus, the importance and effectiveness of ¡§word-of-month of communication¡¨ on internet are much more important than the traditional ¡§word-of-mouth communication¡¨. This research study will be focused on hotels in Kenting area to discuss the effectiveness of purchasing intentions based on the brand awareness of that hotel and messages from the word-of-mouth communication on internet. More importantly, this research study will use customers¡¦ involvement as moderators to further understand the relationships between brand awareness & purchasing intentions, and word-of-mouth communication on internet & purchasing intentions. This research study has chosen two hotels in Kenting area. One hotel has high brand awareness while the other one has low brand awareness. This dissertation has also conducted on-line research based on their word-of-mouth communication on internet and the questionnaire participants are customers who have been to Kenting hotels. After collecting all data, this research has discovered that a hotel¡¦s brand awareness will affect customers¡¦ purchasing intentions. In other words, higher the brand awareness, more purchasing intentions from consumers. In addition, messages from word-of-mouth communication on internet will also affect customers¡¦ purchasing intentions. When the word-of-mouth communication on internet is negative, there will be fewer customers with lower purchasing intentions. Yet, the messages from word-of-mouth communication on internet will have higher effectiveness than the brand awareness of that specific hotel. Nevertheless, consumers¡¦ involvement will not affect the brand awareness, word-of-mouth communication on internet, and purchasing intentions. Last, the conclusion of this research study will provide some practical recommendations for hotel owners. Key words: brand awareness, word-of-mouth on internet, customers¡¦ involvement, and purchasing intentions.

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<p>Ingredient branding implies that a company incorporates an additional brand into their product in order to increase consumer awareness. This has been proven to be successful in certain product categories such as computers and food. These products can be seen as low involvement and low cost products, since they are bought frequently and generally involves low risk for the consumer. Ingredient branding has never been tested on product categories that are categorised as high involvement and high cost, which is therefore the intention of this thesis. By investigating consumers’ attitudes and perception of quality, towards advertisements with and without ingredient brands, we conclude that ingredient branding does not affect consumers in high involvement and high cost product categories, nor in a positive or negative way.</p>

<p>Ingredient branding implies that a company incorporates an additional brand into their product in order to increase consumer awareness. This has been proven to be successful in certain product categories such as computers and food. These products can be seen as low involvement and low cost products, since they are bought frequently and generally involves low risk for the consumer. Ingredient branding has never been tested on product categories that are categorised as high involvement and high cost, which is therefore the intention of this thesis. By investigating consumers’ attitudes and perception of quality, towards advertisements with and without ingredient brands, we conclude that ingredient branding does not affect consumers in high involvement and high cost product categories, nor in a positive or negative way.</p>

Authors: Malin Karlsson, Sandra Karlsson, Amanda Malmberg Tutor: Dr. Setayesh Sattari Examiner: Prof. Anders Pehrsson Background: Consumers increasingly purchase products online due to the widespread use of the Internet. The decision for consumers to purchase online is predicted by their purchase intentions, which in turn is affected by their information privacy concerns. There is a lack of research on IPC and purchase intentions in the context of online personalized advertising. Purpose: To extend the understanding of purchase intentions considering information privacy concerns and involvement in the context of online personalized advertising. Methodology: A survey in form of a questionnaire was conducted in order to gather the information necessary to be able to analyse the relationship between IPC and purchase intentions in the context of online personalized advertising. The sample consists of 18-70 year olds from cities in southern Sweden. Conclusion: Conclusions drawn in this thesis is that when applied in the context of online personalized advertising, there is no significant relationship between IPC and purchase intentions. However, involvement is suggested as having a positive relationship to purchase intentions, as well as a positive moderating effect on the relationship between IPC and purchase intention in the context of online personalized advertising. Keywords: Purchase intentions, Information privacy concerns (IPC), Online personalized advertising, Involvement.

Course/Level: Master thesis, Strategic Marketing Management Authors: Daniel Andersson, Pontus Hjertqvist Thesis advisor: Jukka Hohenthal Title: Customer Involvement in New Service Development: Organizational Implications and Challenges Background: The nature of services is becoming technology-based, which implies that customers are becoming increasingly autonomous from the service firm. Understanding how to involve customers in the development process of such services as well as to recognize the challenges brought by customer involvement in this context should be seen as key issues for developing successful new services. Research questions: RQ1: How are customers involved in the development process of technology-based services? RQ2: How do challenges brought by customer involvement impede new service development? Purpose: The purpose of this thesis was to explore how an organization within the banking industry in Sweden involves its customers in the new service development process Methodology: A qualitative single embedded case study strategy, combining inductive and deductive reasoning. The empirical investigation was conducted using a triangulation of secondary data and primary data collected from semi-structured interviews. Conclusion: Customers are involved in three out of four of the fundamental phases in the development process. The findings acknowledged that a lack of formal routines and process of managing customer involvement impeded the organization to successfully involve customers in their new service development programs. As such, the findings suggests that organizations need to employ a new organizational design optimized for customer involvement in their NSD-programs, where current structures, processes, and mindsets need to be adjusted accordingly. Keywords: New service development, customer involvement, technology-based services, organizational challenges.

Although understudied in emerging markets, in modern globalised economies, family business internationalization is becoming an increasingly more relevant topic. Consequently, our research focuses on investigating the listed family firms in Chinese Mainland in order to fill the research gap. Specifically, we studied the influence of family involvement in ownership and management of companies on their degree of internationalization. Existing theories on internationalization mainly focused on economic aspects, while we adopt the perspective of socio-emotional wealth (SEW) which refers to non economic aspects to investigate this subject. We take listed family firms in Chinese Mainland as our sample. The results show that family involvement in ownership is positively associated with the degree of internationalization and family involvement in management has no certain relation with the degree of internationalization. This is a different finding in this area since previous researches have not taken Chinese listed family firms as samples before. Future research can improve the SEW theory by testing wider samples.

Product placement, also referred to as stealth advertising, raises important questions when it comes to television because a far larger audience views television than movies. Product placement in newscasts is even more controversial. Television news is expected to be free of persuasive attempts and provide citizens with basic information that is of public importance. Yet, product placement blurs the line between journalism and commercial promotion, thus destroying the integrity of the news. Product placement in newscasts raises ethical questions about the effect it has on viewers, provided that they do not realize that they are presented with commercials, framed as news story. Yet, this paper argues that, since viewers focus on the actual news and do not elaborate consciously on the advertised product or brand, product placement in newscasts has little effect on their brand recall. To support this hypothesis the paper compares brand recall from product placement and commercials. Results revealed that this hypothesis is partially true. Important discovery from this study is the fact that product placement directly affects news credibility.

IKEA was founded in 1943 by Ingvar Kamprad and is currently retailing in 44 different countries around the globe. With the implementation of 25 year warranty the importance to validate the quality have increased to satisfy the customer. The aim of this thesis have therefore been to find out the critical factors for kitchen worktops through the expectations of the customers. In addition to this the product development process was investigated to gain an understanding on how IKEA deals with customer complaints today. The thesis was divided in four stages. First the customers’ expectations were investigated by using the survey research method. The formulations of the questions are of great importance in this research method so that the information needed can be gathered without confusion and irritation. The critical factors of the kitchen worktops were also located in this survey and are out of the customer point of view. After the survey was done and the critical factors identified a concept generation phase was started to analyze possible ways of solving the issues with the kitchen worktops. Three proposals of concepts was generated; improvement in quality, improvement in the information communicated by IKEA, and a combination of these two. These proposals were analyzed against each other, against the survey and against the possible concrete gains. When the proposals of concepts were completed a decision to investigate the product development process was made and suggestions on how these critical factors could be found earlier in the process were made. Lastly a proposal of a database system for categorizations of the customer complaints when it comes to different defects were made and proposed to IKEA. Out from the information received by the survey these proposals could be made and the conclusion that scratches and to some extent heat was the most critical flaws, which would be the thing to focus further on. The product development process could also be improved to make it possible to take notice of these critical flaws earlier in the process. To summarize the project was successful and IKEA was really happy with the results, and the extra tasks that were added to this thesis. The first problem description was to only find the customers’ expectations but to get something out of this we added the proposals and the attempt to change the product development process when it comes to kitchen worktops.

The achievement gap is an important problem with serious consequences for the United States’ economy. A long history of oppression has contributed to a substantial gap in achievement between students of minority status or low socioeconomic status and their white or higher income peers. Large scale efforts to address this problem have been unsuccessful in substantially reducing the problem. As parent involvement has been linked to student achievement, capitalizing on strong family-school partnerships offers a valuable opportunity to target student achievement. Low-income and minority parents face many barriers to parent involvement. If schools embrace a more inclusive view of parent involvement and collaborate with parents to reduce these barriers, however, successful family-school partnerships may be formed. Themes for creating such partnerships include recognizing that parents care about their children’s education and want them to succeed, treating parents as equal partners in the educational process, and using innovative techniques to solve problems. / text