Building Brand Value in Business Markets

Academic research and business practice offer multiple strategies to increase perceived value and avoid competing on price. We develop a conceptualization of the strategic choices for building brand value in business-to-business (B2B) markets. This includes the decision regarding the source of brand value and the decision regarding the location of brand investment. The two main sources of brand value are differentiation and relationship building, and the two locations of brand investment are at the product and corporate levels. We test the relative advantages from the customer perspective in a series of discrete choice experiments with managers with purchasing experience. The analysis of the source of branding suggested that differentiation attributes were more valued than relationship attributes. For the location of brand investment, although product-level brand attributes dominate in low expenditure, low risk situations, customers in high expenditure or high risk situations seem to value a combination of product-level and company-level sources of brand value. Insights from the research can help industrial companies to think more strategically about the potential of branding