New Isenberg School Professor Touts Business-to-Business Branding
Tue., Nov 27, 2007
Try naming a consumer product or service that isn’t susceptible to branding, challenges the Isenberg School’s newest marketing professor Brian Brown. The goods and services that we consume, the countries and cities that we visit, the institutions that we patronize—universities and their business schools included—all are fair game for the brander’s craft.
“Before becoming an academic, branding was my career,” emphasizes Brown, who worked as a brand manager with The Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta. When Brown left the corporate world for the Ph.D. program in marketing at Georgia State University, he assumed that his corporate experience would yield academic opportunities for branding research. To his surprise, it did and it didn’t. “The ‘Coke culture’ had given me terrific experience and a passion for consumer branding,” he remarks. “But academic avenues in consumer branding were extremely congested with scholarly studies. The good news was that a second arena of branding research—business-to-business branding—was wide open. There were serious gaps in the academic literature that invited new research.
“While both domains of branding share similarities, it’s the differences that have intrigued me,” Brown continues. “For one thing, in the business-to-business arena, accepting another firm’s brand usually involves a group decision. Because the group typically includes individuals with different perspectives, the marketer must communicate multidimensional aspects of the brand that satisfy those different players. In deciding on a brand, the “buyer” also typically has much more at stake than does an individual consumer. That includes a bigger financial commitment, the “fit” with the buyer’s other products or services, and the ultimate satisfaction of the buyer’s own customers.
There’s also a significant “intangibility” factor in the decision as well. “The buyer isn’t just buying a product or service, but frequently a bundle of complementary goods and services that include training, support, maintenance, logistics, and customization,” notes Brown. “In other words, the customer is buying an integrated solution. That’s a message that the seller should incorporate into his brand message.
A journal article under review by Brown and three colleagues offers an empirically-tested conceptual model that provides a framework for these and other business-to-business branding variables. The research identifies factors that influence a business buying unit’s brand sensitivity, i.e., the unit’s propensity to choose branded versus unbranded product solutions. According to the study, the three principal determinants of brand sensitivity are the importance of the purchase, its complexity, and the “intangibility” factor. But those determinants and brand sensitivity are mediated by the connecting variable, the business buyer’s perception of the overall risk of the purchase.
"In other words, our model boils down to perceived risk," emphasizes Brown. "My research, in fact, indicates a fascinating curvilinear relationship between risk and brand sensitivity. When risk is low or high, established brands seem to matter. What that implies, I think, is that when there isn't much risk in the purchase, buyers just go with the well-known brand name-why put any more effort into the purchase decision? At the same time, when risk is high, the brand name reduces a lot of anxiety and the need for involved justification about its purchase. For example, when a business has a lot riding on the purchase of a computer system, it will minimize its risk by choosing a reliable brand like IBM," notes Brown.
"You can see business-to-business branding in action in the media-IBM included-which pitch products and services to business buyers. The trend on TV is clearly moving in that direction. It turns out that purchasing managers, like the rest of us, watch television too."
Faculty profile page for Prof. Brian Brown.