The study examines how social media can be used in a business-to-business context. To understand the communication conditions, factors has been identified that affects the choice of communication channels for different types of information transferred between parts. Furthermore, the study investigates the underlying reasons for why certain communication channels are chosen before others, in different situations. The study results are based on qualitative semi-structured interviews with employees in a small engineering consulting company. The investigation has focused on employee communication and choice of communication tools primarily in relation to the business relationship. The study answers the following questions: What factors may contribute to the selection of different communication tools in business-to-business? What are the conditions and reasons for employees to use social media in business-to-business? What opportunities can social media pose for managing knowledge exchange with customers in business-to-business? The theoretical framework is based on Media Richness Theory and Social Influence Theory. The results show that factors that affect use of social media between businesses are 1) social environmental influences on attitudes towards social media (positive or negative), 2) individual analogue and digital values, 3) social media are primarily used in a private context 4) individual's role and level within the company. It is proposed that companies require strategies and increased knowledge to operate efficiently with social media in business to business. The results also shows that factors affecting the choice of communications channels between employees and business relationship are: 1) context-dependent, 2) the availability and accessibility, 3) the role and level in the company, 4) customer relationship development, 5) the information degree of ambiguity, 6) communication channel degree of "richness", 7) urgency, 8) confirmation of agreement. / Program: Magisterutbildning i strategisk information och kommunikation

Aim: To understand the influence of guanxi and trust on business to business relationships in the Chinese market. Method: This study was conducted based on an inductive qualitative research method with the use of primary and secondary data. A case study, with semi-structured interview questions and open-end questionnaire, were used for the collection of primary data. In total 27employees were interviewed, 13 through an online application and 14 through an online survey. Result & Conclusions: Guanxi and trust are inseparable and complement each other when building B2B relationships. Renqing and ganqing are part of guanxi which can influence guanxi directly. Trust can be divided into interpersonal and organizational trust and both can build B2B relationships. For the creation of a long-term relationship between business partners, both guanxi and trust are essential to maintain and strengthen the relationship. Suggestion for future research: Because of the limited number of interviews and circumstances, the results of this research are based in one company and three of its business partners. All the interviewed employees work in China and are specialized in the pharmaceutical industry. Therefore, the results are difficult to be generalized, but further studies can be conducted in different fields and industries, such as government-owned companies and various business scopes to investigate if the different levels of guanxi and trust influence business relationships or performance. Contribution of the study: This study contributes to the understanding of how guanxi and trust influence relationships between business partners in China. No matter which starts the initial B2B relationship, both trust and guanxi are essential in building, maintain and strengthening B2B relationships.

This thesis was written as part of a Master of Science Degree in Strategic Entrepreneurship for International Growth and International Marketing. Aligned with the nature of the degree, this study aims to share useful insights to managers and marketers whom are looking into innovating their business by adopting an inbound strategy. This thesis researches a modern topic within business: inbound marketing. It aims to comprehend how the implementation of an effective inbound strategy drives sales growth, by understanding the effects that inbound has over the B2B buying and selling process. The study considers the newly presented changes within the European general data protection regulation and emphasizes the relevance of an inbound strategy. An in-depth study of existing theories and exploratory primary data was conducted in order to attain these objectives. Due to restricted existence of scientific theories within the topic, this study developed an original cohesive relationship model integrating inbound marketing to the B2B buying and selling process. This model served as a theoretical framework for the conduction of this research. The exploratory research was characterized by interviewing a number of experts within the field. Those experts provided indispensable insights regarding the phenomenon in focus, which in combination with the theoretical framework allowed for the completion of this study’s analysis. The focus was to understand the impact that the implementation of an inbound strategy had over business and how such impact led to an increase in sales. The results indicate that when effectively implemented by suitable companies, an inbound marketing strategy is relevant in acquiring potential customers at the right stage of the buyer’s journey and therefore driving a noticeable increase in sales.

Services of 3PL providers are nowadays very commonly used by production and merchant firms. It is happening due to companies' concentration on their own core-business and outsourcing of many of their activities to external suppliers. This thesis is focused on marketing activities of a 3PL provider, which is a specific part of the B2B market, as well as the logistics market. The thesis consists of three parts. First chapter is focused on theoretical definition of marketing and individual aspects, which marketing is concerned with. In the second part, the logistics, the specifies of 3PL logistics and the logistic market in the Czech Republic are presented. These theoretical findings are applied to a particular firm. Its marketing strategy is evaluated and a set of recommendations is proposed to enhance marketing position of the company.

The thesis deals with main issues of B2B marketing and marketing communications of a company providing services in the B2B market. The principles of B2B marketing are less known than those of B2C marketing, although most of the companies operate in the B2B market. The thesis is divided into four chapters. The first chapter concerns the basic conception of marketing and its form nowadays. The two following chapters deal with services marketing and B2B marketing. The last chapter represents an analysis of marketing and communications strategy of Advanced World Transport a.s., which belongs among the biggest private carriers across the whole of Europe.

The main aim of this master’s thesis is to propose marketing strategy for the company LAUFEN CZ s.r.o. The theoretical part contains main marketing terms, which will be used for an analysis of actual situation and for marketing strategy proposal that will lead to the fulfilment of the goals.

Internet marketing and relationship marketing are becoming prevalent in Australian firms. The advent of the internet has created numerous opportunities for marketing professionals to enhance current marketing practices, including relationship marketing. However, the investigation of marketing relationships in an internet environment is scant. Further, there appears to be no investigation of this phenomenon within the context of Australian service industries. Thus this research attempts to bridge the gap that exists between academia and practitioners by investigating internet-facilitated relationship marketing. Given these gaps in the literature, the research problem investigated in this research is: How does B2B internet use affect inter-firm relationships in service industries? The literature does not investigate this research problem in any depth. However, a framework about internet-facilitated marketing relationship in the extant literature was integrated and synthesised with literature about internet marketing and relationship marketing to arrive at three research issues: RI 1: How does level of internet use affect structural and social bonds in an inter-firm relationship? RI 2: How do structural bonds interact with social bonds in an internet environment? RI 3: How do structural and social bonds determine relationship outcomes in an internet environment? To investigate these three research issues, a combination of qualitative and quantitative two-stage methodological approach was used. The first stage was eleven convergent interviews to build on the extant literature and to further confirm and refine the theoretical framework. In the second stage, a survey methodology was used to test the model about internet-facilitated inter-firm relationships in Australian business internet banking users. Data was analysed and the hypotheses specified in the main model were tested using structural equation modelling techniques. Thus this research involved both theory building and theory testing. The findings of this research have implications for the three research issues. The results for the first research issue showed that the internet has little negative impact on relational bonding in the B2B context. That is, technology-mediated transactions in financial services may not be detrimental to established relationships because trade efficiencies are more of a concern for businesses rather than the social aspects. Information technology-enabled connectivity can facilitate trade efficiency, therefore the relationship. Moreover, the impact of internet use on relational bonds of trust and dependence is moderated by the length of B2B internet use. That is, a longer period of dealing with an exchange partner on the internet facilitates relational bonding. The findings for the second research issue were that most interrelationships between structural and social bonds in an internet environment are in line with the generic literature. The findings for the third research issue are related to the relational outcome as a result of bonding. Although the internet has little direct impact on commitment and intention to stay, it contributes indirectly to the relational outcomes through structural and social bonding. In addition, the findings of this research highlight some important issues in relationship marketing research. That is, inter-relationships of the relational constructs depend on the context in which the relationship exists. The main contribution of this theory building research is the development and confirmation of a final theoretical framework about internet-facilitated inter-firm relationships. That framework is a contribution because it is the first rigorously researched step towards understanding the important confluence of two new and powerful streams of business activity of internet marketing and relationship marketing. This thesis has both theoretical and practical implications in the area of internet marketing and relationship marketing. The framework was built from theory and empirical research to represent this process and provides a foundation for further research.

<p>Date June 12, 2008</p><p>Program IT Management</p><p>Authors Jessica Jarrell, 820506.</p><p>Västerås</p><p>Rais Iqbal, 791229.</p><p>Västerås</p><p>Supervisor Ole Liljefors</p><p>Title Business-to-Business IT Integration</p><p>Introduction</p><p>As business world has moved into digital era, new trends in business models have been emerged to do business. Digital infrastructure provided by internet enables enterprises to extend their boundaries for new customer and trading partners. Extending the enterprise without a solid IT infrastructure is incomplete, this is the reasons that enterprises are investing more and more in IT to build an IT integrated infrastructure where all its trading partners are linked together. On the other hand, technological world provides solutions and services to build IT integration for such extended enterprises. A wide variety of IT integration solutions and patterns available for enterprise to meet their integration goals, but this often brings unclear situation where companies have to think a lot before implementing IT integration patterns. A slight mistake in this scenario could shake the equilibrium between IT and business, to keep the equilibrium steady companies need to thoroughly examine their short-term and long-term goals and then different integration patterns can be employed to meet these goals.</p><p>Research Question</p><p>What approaches can be helpful for companies to accomplish successful business-to-business IT integration pattern for their short-term and long-term goals?</p><p>Purpose</p><p>The purpose of this thesis is to describe the concept of extended enterprises and, identify and describe the existing B2B IT integration approaches employed by extended enterprises.</p><p>Method</p><p>The research is of qualitative type and secondary data is used to conduct this research. Books and research papers has been used to construct theoretical framework. Electronic databases available at library of Mälardalen University such as Google scholar, Emerald and interlibrary network of Sweden (Libris) are used to search for secondary data.</p><p>Analysis Findings from the detailed literature study are analyzed to answer the research question. Integration patterns are analyzed described by the different authors of integrations patterns in three different ways. Firstly, integration patterns were analyzed in term of their advantages and disadvantages with technology and business, secondly, maturity of these integration patterns are analyzed and finally these integration patterns are analyzed for company’s short-term and long-term goals.</p><p>Conclusion Business process oriented and method-oriented approaches are good for long-term goals due to handling of business process management in both approaches and reusability aspects of method oriented approach. For short-term goals portal-oriented approach dominating in the integration community, application interface oriented approach is also good to meet the short-term goals. However, combinations of different approaches are found feasible.</p>

<p>Problem: Seco Tools (Thailand) Co., Ltd registrerades under 2001 i Bangkok, Thailand. De har vuxit med 150% sedan start och har idag</p><p>5% marknadsandel. Företaget utvecklar kontinuerligt sin organisation för att kunna expandera ytterligare. Eftersom varumärket är relativt okänt på den thailändska marknaden, måste företagets marknadsföringsarbete ha en god strategi för att uppnå fastställda mål, samt att nå ut till potentiella kunder. Här finns det sedan flera år etablerade kon-kurrerande tillverkare som marknadsför sina varumärken genom direktförsäljning eller distribution. För att ytterligare öka effektiviteten vore det lämpligt att undersöka vilka marknadsföringsaktiviteter som ger bäst resultat, för att skapa ett känt företag och ett starkt varumärke.</p><p>Syfte: Denna undersökning syftar till att utvärdera hur Seco Tools marknadsför sig i Thailand, och ge rekommendationer på vad företaget bör förbättra i sitt marknadsföringsarbete. Detta för att lyckas med att skapa en märkesmedvetenhet hos kunderna och därigenom ta ytterligare marknadsandelar. Författarna avser också att undersöka om företaget anpassat sitt marknadsföringsarbete till den lokala kulturen.</p><p>Metod: Utifrån de använda teoretiska modellerna har intervjufrågor hämtats som sammanställts under empirin. En analys av det insamlade materialet har därefter gjorts, och det har sedan legat till grund för slutdiskussionen.</p><p>Slutsats: Företaget har anpassat sig till den thailändska marknaden. Hänsyn tas till de kulturella skillnaderna både inom organisationen och vid kundkontakt. Idag bedrivs flera bra marknadsföringsaktiviteter. Det finns dock några som skulle kun-na utvecklas. Företaget saknar kännedom om vad kunden behöver. För att bättre kunna identifiera kundernas behov på marknaden borde företaget bli bättre på att samla in information från kunden. Detta sker lämpligast genom marknadsundersökningar som till exempel kundenkäter. Vidare anser vi att de bör förändra sin relationsmarknadsföring gentemot sina viktigaste kunder. Det skulle resultera i nya kontaktnät med fler potentiella kunder som i sin tur ökar möjligheterna för företaget att växa och bli ett mer känt varumärke på den thailändska marknaden.</p>

<p>In this thesis, the brand construct and its connections to <em>risk</em>, <em>value</em> and <em>trust</em> are explored in a Business-to-Business context.</p><p>The different characteristics of B2B and B2C marketing is elaborated upon and coupled with brand management strategies viable in the respective markets.</p><p>Contemporary academic theory on the explored constructs is discussed, and an attempt at conceptually visualizing their suggested linkages is presented.</p><p>Based on the theoretical findings, a qualitative study is conducted by means of interviews with brand managers and marketing executives with the aim of establishing how Swedish industrial multinational companies employ brand strategies in their market communication, and to what extent the constructs explored are communicated as a part of their brand message.</p><p>We find empirical evidence that risk, value and trust indeed are important in the brand communication of industrial companies. However, the relative importance of these constructs is found to be highly dependent on a multitude of both internal and external factors, such as the complexity of the offering, the degree of competition in the marketplace, and the amount of required customer interaction. <em>Trust</em> seems to be the construct most commonly incorporated in the branding activities, and <em>value</em> is not as actively stressed as conjectured.</p><p>The corporate brand appears to be the most important in new tasks, where previous experiences of interaction with the seller is deemed more important in modified and straight re-buys.</p><p>Similar to consumer marketing, the main merit of having a strong brand equity is the ability to charge price premiums, along with often making the short list of potential suppliers in the customers’ procurement processes. However, many industrial companies do not actively employ brand strategies and dedicated brand managers are not commonplace. Further, it cannot be decisively concluded that a strong brand focus is important for all industrial companies and in all markets. Again, external market characteristics, together with internal organizational conditions need to be taken into account.</p>