Business-to-business Brand Management - Реферат

Since the early 1990s brand identity has been the subject of increased academic interest (Aaker, 1991,1996; Aaker & Joachimsthaler, 2000; Alsem & Kostelijik, 2008; Beverland, Napoli, & Lindgreen, 2007; Beverland, Napoli, & Yakimova, 2007; de Chernatony, 1999; de Chernatony, MCDONALD, & Wallace, 2010; Kapferer, 1997, 2004; Keller, 1998,2003; Madhavaram, Badrinarayanan, & MCDONALD, 2005). Building brand identity also fosters trust, facilitates differentiation and helps customers" identification with the brand. More broadly, developing a B2B brand has a positive effect on perceived quality, helps build customer loyalty, increases company power in the distribution network, drives sales volume and revenue whilst adding to balance sheet value in the event of sale. Although several brand identity frameworks have been published in the B2C literature only a small number of studies have considered brand identity in a B2B context.These appear to have been developed predominantly with B2C brands in mind (Table 1). Aaker (1996) advances the Brand Identity Planning System comprising product, the organization, a person and a symbol perspectives whilst Aaker and Joachimsthaler"s (2000) Band Leadership Model augments Aaker"s (1996) work via the inclusion of "brand essence" and "elaboration of brand identity". Building on earlier work (de Chernatony, 1999), de Chernatony (2006) regards vision, culture, positioning, personality, relationships and presentation as components of brand identity whilst Kapferer"s (2004) Hexagonal Identity Prism model conceptualizes brand identity via facets of personality, culture, self-image, reflection, relationship and physique. Kapferer (2004) considers self-image and reflection facets of brand identity. These consumer based constructs appear to be at odds with the consensus of opinion that brand identity is an "input" (cf. de Chernatony, 2006).Drawing on the corporate identity work of Hatch and Schultz (2000), de Chernatony (2006), considers brand identity as "the distinctive or central idea of a brand and how the brand communicates this idea to its stakeholders". In what could be considered a somewhat abstract definition, Kapferer defines brand identity as "specifying the facets of the brands" uniqueness and value" whilst Aaker regards brand identity as "...what the organisation wants the brand to stand for in the customer"s mind" or more simply put "how strategists want the brand to be perceived". The latter researchers regard brand identity as the "vision of how that brand should be perceived by its target audience". Aaker (1996) and Aaker and Joachimsthaler"s (2000) work was considered particularly useful in terms of specifying brand identity due to the clear, concise and unambiguous way the construct has been defined. Aaker considers the brand-customer relationship as the "bottom line" in driving and enhancing brand identity programs whilst Aaker and Joachimsthaler outline how "one goal of the brand should be to create a relationship with its customers".The target population consisted of all UK IT Service organizations due to the market"s highly competitive nature and B2B focus. The relatively undifferentiated nature of most organization"s offer places an increased importance on brand differentiation in a market which is largely driven by standards based technical protocols. The sampling frame consisted of 3241 named senior "marketing" executives working in the UK"s B2B IT services sector that was obtained from the One Source database hosted at the British Library.To operationalize B2B service brand identity, scale development procedures were guided by the extant scaling literature. With service brand identity defined and a priori dimensionality postulated, it was necessary to generate a pool of items that scaled each dimension. A total of 119 items were generated from the literature that sampled the domains of the five postulated dimensions. Table 2 provides details of the relevant literature used to scale each dimension. Items culled/adapted fromInitially, item-to-total and scale reliability estimates were obtained to assess the internal consistency of the scale and remove "garbage" items. Factors needed eigenvalues greater than 1, single items factors were eliminated given the need to develop multi item measures whilst the number of factors extracted should account for 50%-60% of the variance explained. Guided by these criteria a five factor, 20 item solution which accounted for 56.2% of the variance was selected (Table 3). The people managing the communications program for our organization have a good understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of all major marketing communications tools The five factors were labeled employee & client focus, corporate visual identity, brand personality,

Contents

Introduction

1. Literature review on brand identity

2. Defining B2B service brand identity

3. Research methodology

4. Scale development

5. Analysis

Conclusion

References