Utilizing integrated marketing communications to advance purchase intention of customers by improving digital marketing content and channels

Modern customers and their widespread use of digital media offer new opportunities for companies to gather revenues. Companies have therefore started to invest increasingly in digital growth and visibility (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). Trainor (2012) stated that customers are no longer satisfied with only being passive targets of marketing actions, but want instead to serve as co-creators of value, engage with the company and connect with other customers having valuable insights (Trainor, 2012; Garretson, 2008). To succeed in customer empowered world companies need a holistic and customer-centric communication strategy such as integrated marketing communications (IMC) to attract potential customers with a relevant and consistent message across channels. According to Wymbs (2011), digital marketing is actually the most effective when integrated with traditional channels such as face-to-face, the phone or direct mail. The theoretical model in this thesis is based on a combination of the four pillars of integrated marketing communications by Kliathcko (2008) and the AIDAS-model, which can be used in planning customer-centric advertising activities as it refers to a generalized customer purchasing journey, including following stages: awareness, interest, desire, action and satisfaction (Rawal, 2013). The objective of this thesis is to provide understanding of how companies can trigger purchase intention of customers with integrated digital marketing by understanding the values and channel and content preferences of customers. The main focus is on channel and content pillars of IMC. According to the literature review, previous IMC and value research are mainly focused on retail or product context. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to bring insight into the service context. This research is provided for the needs of Fortum HorsePower and collecting the data was implemented by interviewing existing customers of Fortum HorsePower-service, which is the main limitation in this study. As the IMC aims at providing customer-centric communications, it was a rational choice to collect data by interviewing customers. Altogether, ten in-depth interviews were carried out to obtain understanding of the research phenomena. The findings suggested that channel choices and content may affect the purchase intention of customers. It seems that the information needs and preferred channels may vary depending on the stage of purchasing journey. The interviewees named content topics they find interesting and also values that guide their decision-making, and these topics and values should be utilized in content creation and customer value proposition to provide attractive and relevant advertising. Several interviewees stated that they look for user reviews on digital channels or call their acquaintances as pre-purchase investigation and actually more than half of the interviewees could make the purchase based on reviews. Websites, email and Facebook were the most preferred digital channels among the interviewees, but despite the digital context of the research, traditional phone calls and face-to-face meetings with sales representatives are wished for. The theoretical contribution of this research provides understanding of channel choices and content topics that may advance purchase intention towards action. Future research could deepen the understanding of IMC at different stages of the customer journey, which would help to customize advertising and to use attribution modeling to understand the effectiveness of different customer touch points

Factors affecting to managerial success of an inter-organizational strategic relationship

As the technological development and the change of the business environment are faster than ever, sustainable competitive advantage has become increasingly challenging to attain. To foster competitiveness many companies have formed strategic alliances. However, gaining expected value from the relationship has proved to be difficult. The issue appears to be in attaining the value rather than lacking the potential value. Hence, the motivation for this thesis and the primary objective of this study is to identify some of the key factors that influence the managerial success of an inter-organizational strategic relationship. To provide a solid picture of the factors affecting the managerial success of an inter-organizational strategic relationship there are three key theoretical areas that this thesis examines. Firstly, it appears to be important to understand why companies prefer collaboration in areas requiring knowledge exchange, secondly to identify the factors affecting the inter-organizational knowledge exchange, and thirdly to establish how such relationships can be managed. Hence, the literature part of this thesis examines the latest articles published in top management and strategic management journals regarding these three key theoretical areas. In addition, to support the creation of a holistic picture, the thesis introduces findings of a qualitative empirical study from the Finnish technology industry. The findings of the study suggest that there are at least five themes that are important for the success of a strategic relationship: 1.) Existence of a market need; 2.) Realistic ability to fulfill the need together; 3.) Willingness and commitment; 4.) Capability to implement the jointly agreed strategy; 5.) Continuous two way communication at all hierarchical levels.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Haaveena yrittäjyys : liiketoimintasuunnitelma tutuksi

Opinnäytetyöni tarkoituksena on ollut tutustua liiketoimintasuunnitelmaan itse suunnitellun yrityksen avulla. Työllä ei ole ulkopuolista toimeksiantajaa, vaan se perustui kirjoittajan omiin haaveisiin yrittäjyydestä. Yritys on tällä hetkellä fiktiivinen, mutta olisi myös mahdollista perustaa laaditun suunnitelman pohjalta. Teoriaosuudessa on käyty läpi kattavasti yrittäjyyden perusteita ja liiketoimintasuunnitelman osa-alueita. Teorian liiketoimintasuunnitelmaosuudessa kirjoittaja on pohtinut oman yrityksensä tapoja toimia kyseessä olevalla alueella, kuitenkaan tekemättä erillistä liiketoimintasuunnitelmaa. Tavoitteena on ollut myös selvittää tapaustutkimuksen avulla, onko liikeidea mahdollista toteuttaa ja onko se taloudellisesti kannattavaa. Opinnäytetyötä varten on perehdytty aiheeseen liittyvään kirjallisuuteen, sekä internet lähteisiin ja kokeiltu yrittäjyyttä käytännössä pop-up kahvilan perustamisen avulla. Opinnäytetyön tuloksien avulla on saatu selville, onko kannattavaa perustaa kyseinen yritys Kuopioon ja tuntuuko yrittäjyys kirjoittajasta itsestään hyvälle ammatinvalinnalle. Johtopäätöksenä voidaan todeta, että yritys olisi kannattava perustaa tekemällä muutamia muutoksia konseptiin ja hiomalla kannattavuus kohdilleen.The purpose of this thesis was to get acquainted with the business plan with self-planned company. This thesis doesn’t have a client because it is based on the writer’s own will to become an entrepreneur. At this moment, the company is fictional but someday in the future it could be implemented with this business plan. The theoretical part is all about different parts of business plan and entrepreneurship. The theoretical framework also includes all the parts that a good business plan should have. In the theoretical part which deals with the business plan, the writer has thought about the ways her own company is working in those parts without writing a separate business plan. The aim has been to find out, with the case study research method, if this business plan can really work out and if it is economically profitable. In the research part of the thesis, the writer got acquainted with related literature and experimented entrepreneurship in practice by setting up a pop-up café. At the end of the thesis, a summary is made as to whether it is profitable to establish the company in question and if the writer feels that being an entrepreneur is right career for her. The conclusion can be stated that it would be profitable to establish the company to making few changes for the concept

Knowledge representation and text mining in biomedical, healthcare, and political domains

Knowledge representation and text mining can be employed to discover new knowledge and develop services by using the massive amounts of text gathered by modern information systems. The applied methods should take into account the domain-specific nature of knowledge. This thesis explores knowledge representation and text mining in three application domains. Biomolecular events can be described very precisely and concisely with appropriate representation schemes. Protein–protein interactions are commonly modelled in biological databases as binary relationships, whereas the complex relationships used in text mining are rich in information. The experimental results of this thesis show that complex relationships can be reduced to binary relationships and that it is possible to reconstruct complex relationships from mixtures of linguistically similar relationships. This encourages the extraction of complex relationships from the scientific literature even if binary relationships are required by the application at hand. The experimental results on cross-validation schemes for pair-input data help to understand how existing knowledge regarding dependent instances (such those concerning protein–protein pairs) can be leveraged to improve the generalisation performance estimates of learned models. Healthcare documents and news articles contain knowledge that is more difficult to model than biomolecular events and tend to have larger vocabularies than biomedical scientific articles. This thesis describes an ontology that models patient education documents and their content in order to improve the availability and quality of such documents. The experimental results of this thesis also show that the Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation measures are a viable option for the automatic evaluation of textual patient record summarisation methods and that the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve can be used in a large-scale sentiment analysis. The sentiment analysis of Reuters news corpora suggests that the Western mainstream media portrays China negatively in politics-related articles but not in general, which provides new evidence to consider in the debate over the image of China in the Western media

Measurement of sustainability metrics in oil & gas and food industries: industry specific context

An empirical comparison of two companies from different industries in terms of their reported sustainability metrics in the supply chain context. The thesis shows how the two companies differ in their emphasis for sustainability matters. This creates a premise on how the two industries potentially differ in terms of their approach to sustainability

Internal branding in business-to-business environment – measuring holistic brand image through employee brand perceptions

After the boom of the information technology branch in the 1990s, companies around the world are facing major challenges. Nowadays, it is not enough to have efficient logistic capabilities or unique production methods; there must be some completely new ways to make the difference between company and one’s competitors. The initial concept of competitive advantage is getting fundamentally new aspects as the brands, instead of products, are becoming the real source of competitive advantage. The meaning of the employee brand perceptions has raised its head during the last few years. For example, according to Colin Mitchell (2002), it is a fact of business, that if employees do not care about or understand their company’s brands, they will ultimately weaken their organizations. Internal branding, when done well, allows employees to move from simply being informed to actually understanding the information, becoming committed, so that they can change their behaviour in support of the company goals (Steinmetz, 2004:9). The purpose of the study is to examine ways to measure the holistic brand image through internal branding in the business-to-business environment. As an outcome from the study, a three dimensional internal brand management scale was formed based on an exploratory factor analysis. The scale creates a foundation for internal branding research by emphasizing the company personnel’s important role in holistic brand building. Founding on the theoretical framework created built on a literature review, an empirical survey was conducted to test and apply the scale in real life situation.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Straw composting as a source of CO2 for greenhouses = Koldioxid till växthuset från halmkompost

Nykyiset kasvihuonekasvien hiilidioksidilannoitusmenetelmät ovat melko kalliita ja ne lisäävät usein huomattavasti tuotantokustannuksia. Tässä julkaisussa kerrotaan vaihtoehtoisesta tavasta tuottaa olkikompostista hiilidioksidia kasvihuoneeseen tehokkaasti, turvallisesti ja taloudellisesti. Tutkimus käsitti kirjallisuuskatsauksen ja 13 kenttäkompostointikoetta neljällä eri kompostointilaitteella toteutettuna. Tuore silputtu olki tuotti hiilidioksidia paremmin kuin paalattu olki. Lämpöeristetyssä kompostorissa 100 kg silputtua olkea tuotti noin 55 kg hiilidioksidia. Tehokas kompostointiaika oli kuukaudesta puoleentoista kuukautta. Muovilla peitetyssä kompostissa 100 kg suurpaaliin paalattua olkea tuotti puolestaan 11,2 kg hiilidioksidia kahden ensimmäisen ja 3,4 kg kahden seuraavan kuukauden aikana. Kompostihiilidioksidin arvioiduksi hinnaksi tuli 0,37-0,6 mk/kg. Vertailun vuoksi säiliöhiilidioksidin hinta on arviolta 1-2 mk/kg. Kompostikaasu ei juurikaan lisää kasvihuoneilman mikrobimäärää eikä kompostissa syntynyt kasveille tai ihmiselle haitallisia kaasuja. Kompostointimenetelmällä pystytään kasvihuoneissa ylläpitämään tai ylittämään normaalin ilman hiilidioksiditaso, kunhan vain kompostin koko on riittävän suuri. Menetelmä soveltuu parhaiten pienille alle 1000 m2 tiloille ja luomutuotantoon.As part of a 3-year research project, 13 large-scale experiments were conducted with a small composter, a drum composter, an insulated box composter and a non-insulated round bale compost. The aim was to develop an environmentally sound and economical method of straw composting as alternative fertilization of CO2 in greenhouses. A round bale compost consisting of eight bales (volume 15.2 m3, dry matter 1474 kg, 97 kg/m3) produced 438 kg of CO2 during the 4-month period of experimentation. The CO2 content in the composting gas varied between 900 and 5000 ppm. CO2 level of 356 ppm was exceeded in the greenhouse, even with increased luminosity and ventilation. No diseases or organisms derived from the compost were found. The raw material price of the CO2 produced by composting was USD 0.12/kg. Non-insulated composts only functioned satisfactorily during the warm cultivation period. In the box composter a 10 m3 charge of fresh crushed straw (dry matter 450 kg, 45 kg/m3) produced 220 kg of CO2 during the 2-month period of experimentation. The CO2 content in the composting gas fluctuated between 650 and 47 000 ppm. The raw material price of the CO2 produced was USD 0.08/kg. The price of commercial CO2 was USD 0.2-0.4 USD/kg. The composter also worked well in winter. Composting was tested with small composters. The optimal moisture of compost is 60-70%. The drum composter was not suitable for straw because the straw could not be treaded and so it did not compost properly. More work and know-how are required to further improve the insulated composting of straw.vokKirjasto Aj-