Obesity is an urgent health problem with restaurants accounting for about half of all food expenditure in the U.S. Understanding consumer’s preferences for low-calorie food could help interested restaurants in the foodservice industry facilitate consumers’ low-calorie choices in a positive way without compromising their ability to efficiently meet consumers’ preferences. The purpose of this study was to (1) investigate consumers’ preferences among four forms of low-calorie food alternatives: reformulation, elimination, resizing, and substitution; and (2) to explore which consumers are likely to choose low-calorie menu items and understand what motivates them to make healthy choices using the theory of planned behavior. Results showed that consumers have a clear preference towards elimination and substitution, rather than resizing and reformulation. The trend that high-calorie ingredients were often eliminated or substituted with healthier ingredients highlighted the importance and effectiveness of menu calorie labeling as consumers may adjust their food choices based on calorie information. Moreover, consumers showed high taste expectations for traditional favorite foods such as pizza and burger. Therefore, the entrée type of menu items is more feasible and amenable to be modified to decrease the calorie content. Marketing practices could be used to educate consumers about new low-calorie alternatives to create the demand and promote these items. Lastly, food choice motives were found to influence consumers’ behavioral intention, indicating that they were meaningful additions to the TPB model.

Nowadays, the marketing communication is a very crucial factor of the business success. Efficient targeting, understanding of customer's needs and using opportunities is being the significant competitive advantage. Nevertheless, there are many companies that don't understand the importance of the marketing approach and AGRO-partner is one of them. That is why, I have chosen the Marketing strategy proposal for AGRO-partner s.r.o. to be my master thesis theme. The aim of the thesis is to compose the strategy based on strategic goals of the company, considering specifics of B-to-B markets, surroundings of the company and its realistic sources.

The aim of this master thesis is to outline Portugal as a tourist destination and to sum up its promotional activities on the Czech market. First part of the thesis describes destination marketing management in general from both tactic as well as strategic point of view. The chapter especially focuses on marketing specifics in the tourism area. Second part of the thesis holds fort on destination Portugal and its supply of tourism products, the main tourism target groups and the strategic management of tourism in the country. A special stress is put on creating an overwiev of the promotional activites of Portugal on the Czech market and on proposing remedies that will lead to better and more effcetive marketing communication.

<div>In my main dissertation essay, I investigate advertising spending during a recession. Advertising plays an important role in creating awareness, preference and purchase intent for many products and services. However, advertising is often cut when a firm needs to control costs. This empirical study examines a unique set of factors which motivated 553 firms to change their advertising spending during the Great Recession. The first half of the Great Recession had a moderate 2% decline in GDP and 1% to 2% cuts in advertising spending. The seasonality effect was weaker, which indicates that firms were not as likely to carryover spending from the prior year. The peak of the Great Recession had a GDP decline as high as 7%, which is considered severe. Average advertising spending declined by 13%. In addition to the seasonality effect, decreasing sales decreased advertising spending. Increasing firm risk tends to decrease advertising spending during the peak of the Great Recession, but not before. Finally, firms in high advertising intensity industries, where advertising is strategically important, had modest budget cuts. In contrast, firms in low-intensity industries had much larger percentage cuts.</div><div>The second essay examines real earnings management using advertising budgets” examines. Real earnings management occurs when managers change real activities to meet or beat important earnings benchmarks. Advertising has a limited short-term impact on firm sales for many products. Therefore, when a firm’s earnings are below key benchmarks for a fiscal quarter (year), managers are compelled to reduce advertising expenditures to boost earnings. This study examines factors which persuade firms to manage earnings using advertising budgets. Similar to earlier studies, we find firms suspect of managing earnings upwards reducing advertising expenses. The findings indicate that B2C firms are more likely to manage earnings by reducing advertising expenses than B2B firms. The findings also reveal that suspect firms which spend more in high advertising elasticity mediums such as TV do not reduce advertising spending as much as firms which spend more in low advertising elasticity mediums such as newspapers and magazines. The study also find evidence to suggest that suspect firms which report advertising expenditure in their income statement make smaller advertising spending cuts than firms which don’t report advertising expenditure. Finally, earnings management activity is much stronger during the last quarter of the fiscal year.</div>

With increasing globalisation of the world economy, there is growing interest in international business research among academics, business practitioners and public policy makers. As marketing is usually the first corporate function to internationalise, it occupies the centre-stage in the international strategy debate. The objective of this study is to understand the environmental and organisational factors that drive the desirable outcomes of learning, innovation and performance in multinational firms. By adapting the IO-based, resource-based and contingency theories, the study proposes the environment-conduct-outcome framework and a model of global marketing in MNCs. Using the structural equation modelling-based PLS methodology, the model is estimated with data from a global survey of marketing managers in MNC subsidiaries. The results show that the traditional international marketing strategy and organisational structure constructs of adaptation and autonomy do not have a significant direct effect on MNC performance. Instead, the effects are largely mediated by the networking, learning and innovation constructs that are included in the proposed model. The study also shows that, whereas collaborative decision making has a positive effect on interunit learning, subsidiary autonomy has a significant influence on innovativeness in MNC subsidiaries. Finally, it is found that marketing mix adaptation has an adverse impact on the performance of MNCs facing high global integration pressures but improves the performance of MNCs confronted with low global integration pressures. The findings have important implications for global marketing in MNCs. First, to enhance organisational learning and innovation and ultimately improve corporate performance, MNCs should simultaneously develop the potentially conflicting organisational attributes of collective decision-making among the subsidiaries and greater autonomy to the subsidiaries. Second, to tap local knowledge, MNCs should increasingly regard their country units as 'colleges' or 'seminaries' of learning rather than merely as 'subsidiaries' with secondary or subordinate roles. Finally, to improve MNC performance, the key requirement is to achieve a good fit between the global organisational structure, marketing strategy and business environment. Overall, the results provide partial support for the IO-based and resource-based views and strong support for the contingency perspective in international strategy.

<p>Aim:The overall aim of this study was to obtain more knowledge on the implementation of health care marketing in Sweden, using Uppsala University Hospital (UUH) as a case study. Additionally, based on the results of this case study, the aim was also to give concrete suggestions on how to enable increased focus on the formulation and implementation of health care marketing management strategies. This gives the study a slightly normative approach and aim, since the line is not drawn at description and analysis but also advocate guidelines for the enabling of market orientation.</p><p>Method: The chosen methodology of the study was qualitative, as the study sought to explore, interpret and gain a deeper knowledge of the research area.  Three different strategies of primary data collection were used; (1) interviews with key hospital managers, (2) a survey sent to all heads of clinical departments (68 departments) and (3) the study of selected UUH internal documents and UUH internal material related to the subject. The massive data was consolidated, reported and analyzed as separate parts and as well as an overview analysis from a health care marketing management theoretical framework.</p><p>Results & Conclusions:The study showed that UUH, despite the fact that they produce an annual revenue from health care services sales of approx 1,5 billion SEK, lacks almost every aspect of the tools and abilities necessary to function on a competitive marketplace. This included a non-marketing based planning process, the absence of a marketing organizational unit, no marketing research abilities etc. There were also facts pointing at severe flaws in the accounting systems, uncertainties of the legality of the current marketing activities and no marketing-stimulating incentive-systems in place. Besides these hard facts, the conservative, non-market oriented, organizational culture was deemed to make an attempted marketing adaption very hard to implement. The interviews provided valuable data for the structure and analysis. The survey had a very low response-rate, which didn´t provide any valuable data per se, but was interpreted to support the analysis of the organizational flaws in regard to marketing orientation. The internal document study also resulted in support of this analysis and increased the validity. Based on the analysis, a suggestion for a “road map” to successfully market-adapt Swedish health care was presented.</p><p>Suggestions for future research:Health care marketing most likely constitute its own area of research which also is specific for Sweden, which gives infinite opportunities for further studies. The implementation of marketing strategies in health care is an area that really needs to be further studied, therefore a suggestion for future research is to try and find out just how to enable implementation of a marketing-orientation in an organization which never had one. Another suggestion for further research could be the study of how economic incentive systems and other means of co-worker stimulation influence the production of health care services.</p><p>Contribution of the thesis:We believe that this study will strengthen the marketing understanding for UUH personnel at both managerial as well as all other organizational levels that are interested in the subject. We also believe that politicians, both locally and nationally, will benefit from practical knowledge regarding health care marketing mechanisms currently in place. Though conducted as a case study at one hospital, we deem that the analysis and suggestions are applicable for many other health care providers acting on the Swedish health care services marketplace, possibly contributing to the development of Swedish health care.</p>

Background: During the last years, the boom of the Internet has carried along with it new possibilities for communication, in addition, other technological developments of society together act to form a new reality in which companies have to rethink their means for com-municating with consumers. Problem and Purpose: In a new reality where consumers seem to reap all the benefits of the technological changes, how then, should companies adjust to the changing environment? The authors first investigated the modern media environment and found some trends in how it is evolving, and after listening to what some experts within the field think about the future and of what should be done, they them-selves endeavoured to generate some guidance for companies in this matter. Method: This thesis is somewhat of a Delphi study, which means that it heavily relies on the statements of experts. What they have said has played a crucial role in the authors’ own formulation of guid-ance. The experts were interviewed either face-to-face, or through the exchange of e-mails. Conclusions: Major trends in how the media environment is transforming are; technology as an enhancer to rather becoming a determinant, segmentation to fragmentation, decreasing- to increasing returns to scale, an opening for entirely new business concepts and an in-creasing value of intangible assets as a complement to traditional, tangible assets. The authors then presented some elements that would be of crucial significance in this new environment, and they also formulated some more specific guidance in how these ele-ments could be instigated in companies. They were; Speed and flexibility, customization and sustainability. Advice in how they could be instigated where then summarized and illustrated in the “New Digital World Market Communication Diamond”, which basically emphasizes the need for updating the values and the cor-porate culture, the need for streamlining supply chains, the need of truly finding and using information about consumers, and fi-nally, the need for adaptive experimentation.

Aim:The overall aim of this study was to obtain more knowledge on the implementation of health care marketing in Sweden, using Uppsala University Hospital (UUH) as a case study. Additionally, based on the results of this case study, the aim was also to give concrete suggestions on how to enable increased focus on the formulation and implementation of health care marketing management strategies. This gives the study a slightly normative approach and aim, since the line is not drawn at description and analysis but also advocate guidelines for the enabling of market orientation. Method: The chosen methodology of the study was qualitative, as the study sought to explore, interpret and gain a deeper knowledge of the research area.  Three different strategies of primary data collection were used; (1) interviews with key hospital managers, (2) a survey sent to all heads of clinical departments (68 departments) and (3) the study of selected UUH internal documents and UUH internal material related to the subject. The massive data was consolidated, reported and analyzed as separate parts and as well as an overview analysis from a health care marketing management theoretical framework. Results &amp; Conclusions:The study showed that UUH, despite the fact that they produce an annual revenue from health care services sales of approx 1,5 billion SEK, lacks almost every aspect of the tools and abilities necessary to function on a competitive marketplace. This included a non-marketing based planning process, the absence of a marketing organizational unit, no marketing research abilities etc. There were also facts pointing at severe flaws in the accounting systems, uncertainties of the legality of the current marketing activities and no marketing-stimulating incentive-systems in place. Besides these hard facts, the conservative, non-market oriented, organizational culture was deemed to make an attempted marketing adaption very hard to implement. The interviews provided valuable data for the structure and analysis. The survey had a very low response-rate, which didn´t provide any valuable data per se, but was interpreted to support the analysis of the organizational flaws in regard to marketing orientation. The internal document study also resulted in support of this analysis and increased the validity. Based on the analysis, a suggestion for a “road map” to successfully market-adapt Swedish health care was presented. Suggestions for future research:Health care marketing most likely constitute its own area of research which also is specific for Sweden, which gives infinite opportunities for further studies. The implementation of marketing strategies in health care is an area that really needs to be further studied, therefore a suggestion for future research is to try and find out just how to enable implementation of a marketing-orientation in an organization which never had one. Another suggestion for further research could be the study of how economic incentive systems and other means of co-worker stimulation influence the production of health care services. Contribution of the thesis:We believe that this study will strengthen the marketing understanding for UUH personnel at both managerial as well as all other organizational levels that are interested in the subject. We also believe that politicians, both locally and nationally, will benefit from practical knowledge regarding health care marketing mechanisms currently in place. Though conducted as a case study at one hospital, we deem that the analysis and suggestions are applicable for many other health care providers acting on the Swedish health care services marketplace, possibly contributing to the development of Swedish health care.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the way destination marketing works and whatneeds to be done to implant a destination image into the tourists mind. The marketingclaims that the occurrence of recognition and recall makes an image become activelyrecognized in the mind of customers. To visualize this case, the Swedish city Östersund, isexamined to show how the responsible tourist information office succeeded with theimplementation of their image into the tourists mind. To clarify this, a comparison is madefrom questionnaires hold in the summer and winter 2010 as well as an qualitative interviewwith the managing director of the tourist office in Östersund Camilla Olsson.

Research Objects: we choose two banks as research objects. One is a Swedish bank, Swedbank, which was founded in 1820, the other is a Chinese bank, Minsheng Bank (CMBC), which is a new bank when compared with Swedbank. Purpose &amp; Aim: The 2008 financial crisis hurt banks badly, and consequently how they can become stronger to resist future crises and gain competitive advantages is a key topic for them. There is no doubt that there are many factors that makes a bank successful, but employees are one of the most important factors in a service industry. Therefore, this research study is focused on internal marketing in banks. In addition, this study will attempt to assess whether two banks can learn from each other through the comparison of their internal marketing efforts. Research Methodology: this study will rely on the data collected from the interviews with a manager and an employee from two banks. Books and articles are also been used for secondary data collection. Findings &amp; Conclusion: The research revealed that Swedbank tend to do a better job in satisfying employees' needs, sharing value, having an appropriate organisational culture and being more conscious to treat the employees as customers, in comparison with CMBC. While CMBC need to make more effort in this regard, it does not mean that they must copy what Swedbank do, but rather to establish an appropriate organisational culture for their own internal market. Contribution &amp; Suggestion: In the end, the suggestions have been listed for both banks to improve their internal marketing programme.