This introductory chapter outlines the foundations of the study by contextualizing the role of legitimacy, corporate responsibility, and crisis communication in contemporary global business. It begins by establishing the theoretical significance of organizational legitimacy, particularly in ethically sensitive industries such as infant nutrition. The chapter problematizes the disjunction betwe

This research examines adult consumers’ inclination towards beauty brands in connection to the phenomenon; “Sephora Kids.” Focusing on consumers' ethical considerations, this research investigates whether child-targeted marketing influences beauty consumers’ inclination toward these beauty brands.

This research aims to explore how consumer navigate their behavior in response to conflicting ethical dilemmas, in which a brand that was once perceived as ethical breaches its commitments and thereby becomes unethical in public discourse. The theoretical lens of Boltanski and Thévenot’s (2006) Economies of Worth serves as a lens to explore how the participants navigate ethical brands becoming une

Keywords: Retro branding, message framing, message sequencing, nostalgia proneness, consumer innovativeness, willingness to try, Fast-moving consumer goods, new product brands, retail environment. Purpose: The study addresses the limited understanding of retro branding´s effectiveness in retail environments, particularly for new FMCG product brands without established heritage. It explores how

This study explores the underlying motivations that lead middle-class consumers to eschew visible branding in favor of more inconspicuous forms of brands in their expression of self. Within the framework of contemporary Consumer Culture Theory, identity construction through symbolic consumption has been extensively examined. In this context, fashion, particularly the use of branded logos, has b

Title: Cross-Cultural Brand Perception and Purchasing Motivation: Exploring Chinese and Swedish Consumer Responses to Volvo and BYD Date of seminar: 05-06-2025 Course: BUSN39 - Degree Project in Global Marketing - Master Level Authors: Yujing Jiang and Xinlei Liu Supervisor: Veronika Tarnovskaya Keywords: International Brand, Brand Perception, Purchasing Motivation, Cross-culture, Home Country &am

Title: The Emotional Bond: Exploring Emotional Brand Attachment in the Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) Model Course: BUSN39 - Degree Project in Global Marketing Authors: Oskar Andersson, Luca Pedrotti Supervisor: Jon Bertilsson Purpose: The study aims to uncover the key drivers that foster emotional brand attachment within the D2C model. Methodology: A qualitative research design was employed and data wa

Title: Hedging with Heritage: Investigating the risk-mitigating role of Corporate Brand Heritage Course: BUSN39 - Degree Project in Global Marketing Purpose: This study aims to examine the relationship between corporate brand heritage and their stock price volatility. Methodology: A quantitative approach is employed, using researcher-assigned formative indicators to quantify corporate brand herit

Automatisk sömnklassificering med hjälp av artificiell intelligens. Sömn är avgörande för vår hälsa, men att manuellt analysera sömn är både tidskrävande och kostsamt. Genom att använda artificiell intelligens har vi utvecklat en metod som automatiskt kan klassificera sömnstadier baserat på EEG-signaler, vilket kan effektivisera sömnanalys. Människor spenderar ungefär en tredjedel av sina liv sHistorically, sleep stage classification has relied on manual scoring performed by experienced professionals. In recent years, the emergence of machine learning has enabled the automation of this process, thus saving both time and resources. Many of these sleep staging models depend on data which already has been annotated by a professional, but a few try to exploit the vast amount of unlabelled d

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of nostalgic short-form video on visit intention, including the interaction of nostalgia to perceived self-continuity, attitude towards location, and previous travel experiences. Methodology: The study uses an experimental design that compares individuals’ responses to nostalgic vs non-nostalgic short-form video. Multiple regression an

Purpose: This thesis investigates how the source of product recommendations, specifically, whether delivered by a human expert or an AI system, affects consumer trust and subsequent purchase intentions during the evaluation stage of the online consumer journey. The research further examines how these effects are moderated by the level of perceived risk. Main Research Question: How does the use of

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine consumer-brand relationships in the context of football, focusing on how team performance influences fans’ behavioral intentions in Allsvenskan. It further explored how this relationship is shaped by team identification and fans own perceptions about themselves and their teams. Research Question: What is the impact of a football team’s poor perfor

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) from wearable sensors is often constrained by limited labeled data and varying device placements. This thesis investigates a Transformer-based self-supervised approach that learns representations via a masked reconstruction and noise-injection pretext task, followed by fine-tuning on smaller labeled datasets. Experiments on WISDM, REALWORLD, and OPPORTUNITY confir

Keywords: Children and Consumption, Children and Social Media, Sephora Kids, Kidfluencer Culture, Digital Consumer Culture, Beauty Norms, Gender Socialisation, Gender Performativity, Social Media, TikTok Thesis aim: The aim of this study is to explore how young children perform beauty practices on social media platforms. Particularly, this study aims to deepen the understanding of the phenomena o

Background: The beauty industry has transitioned away from traditional marketing and toward interactive, social media-driven techniques, with firms engaging customers with influencers and user-generated content on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. While most studies focus on advertisements and influencers, little is known about how average users, particularly young women, interact with beaut

This thesis explores how young consumers navigate consumer guilt within the context of social media-narrated consumption. While social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok are known to stimulate desire and shape consumer identity, less is known about how they influence emotional responses after consumption, particularly guilt. Existing literature has largely treated social media and consumer

Purpose: This thesis aims to investigate how customers’ pre-existing brand loyalty influences their perceptions of four characteristics – Perceived Usefulness (PU), Perceived Ease of Use (PEoU), Perceived Trustworthiness (PT), and Perceived Human-likeness (PH) – of AI chatbots used in customer service. In turn, we strive to examine how those perceptions affect overall customer satisfaction towards

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore how consumers navigate and justify their consumption habits while striving for a more sustainable identity. The study examines the internal dilemmas that arise when sustainable values confront the realities of identity expression and social influence. Methodology: A qualitative research approach was adopted, in the form of in-depth interviews, invo

Abstract Title: The Sound of Silence: Conceptualizing Strategic CSR Silence as a Communication Practice Date of Seminar: 05-06-2025 Course: BUSN39 - Degree Project in Global Marketing - Master Level Authors: Bob Groeneveld and Vivian Reijntjes Supervisor: Jon Bertilsson Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR); CSR Communication; Strategic Silence; Critical Theory; Discursive Closure;

It takes a village to raise a child. It also takes a village to care for our elders - and with this ambition my project of generational housing was created. However, our elders lived a whole life before we came along, which I choose to value as a resource in order to create balance in the everyday life of families with working parents. The neighbourhood is conceived as a semi-collective unit at