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Role of Brands in B2B

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Is Your Company Overestimating the Power of Brands?
The Role of Brands in B2B Markets

The B2B market requires a very different sales and marketing approach than B2C. Yet, companies in the B2B space continue to over emphasize certain sales and marketing activities at the expense of others. This paper explores the principal problems with the current sales and marketing approach in the B2B space and identifies what’s required to improve it.
Most B2B companies are committed to building a strong brand. Open any quarterly report, article, or press release and it’s there: “Building a strong brand is at the core of what we want to do. A strong brand will enable us to drive customer adoption and acceptance in the market.” The confidence in …show more content…

A Customer Value Model is a comprehensive accounting of the value, expressed in monetary terms, that a supplier delivers, or could deliver, compared to the value of competing solutions. In building a Customer Value Model the company examines the way in which all the components of its offering (products, programs, systems, and services) impact, or could impact, functionality and performance in the customer’s unique situation. It expresses this impact in monetary terms (e.g., cost per transaction, productivity per hour, etc.) It must then conduct a similar analysis for the competitive offering or offerings (whatever the “next best alternative is”). Because this research is conducted with real customers in real usage situations, it provides an objective and data-driven basis for comparison. It helps companies exploit opportunities in customer segments where they provide superior value, and shore up weaknesses in segments where their value proposition is inferior. It is important to do this because, as Anderson and Narus point out, in choosing between competitive alternatives business customers look at two factors: price and value. Suppose, for example, that a company were considering proposals from two Learning Management System (LMS) providers: Saba and Docent. It will compare the two offerings in terms of the following equation: (ValueSaba – PriceSaba ) vs (ValueDocent - PriceDocent)

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