Branding principles - application to business-to-business branding

Abstract

This essay consists of a review of three books on Brand Management. The books are reviewed with the purpose of arriving at an approach for b2b branding. The three authors Travis, Davis and Aaker show different approaches to branding. Travis is anecdotal, Aaker is conceptual and Davis adopts a mixture of the two approaches. Consequently, Travis targets the practitioner, Aaker targets the academic and Davis targets both. The three authors give useful principles for branding in general. But none of them directly addresses the issue of b2b branding. This paper provides an approach to b2b branding integrating Aaker5 s brand identity framework and the principles of b2b marketing. High value b2b purchases are typically made by a buying center, a formal committee constituted for that purpose. The committee members in the buying center are known to play different buying roles like initiator, influences specifier, approver, user, buyer, gatekeeper and decider (Webster and Wind, 1972). The expectations from the brand are different for different roles and these expectations are specifically taken into account by the b2b branding approach suggested in this paper. Aaker's (1996) brand identity framework has four components namely brand as product, brand as organization, brand as person and brand as symbol (Aaker's four). The approach recommended here elaborates on what should be done under Aaker's four to satisfy the brand expectations of the members in the buying center.