Evaluating brands
What is the value and how do you measure a B-2-B brand? A common theme in marketing literature is that the value of a brand can be expressed by two factors: Are customers willing to recommend you, and are they willing to pay a premium? Both factors are obviously good to know and have their own implications on your position and marketing / pricing strategy, but before you start to drill down deeper into the recommend factor, you really don’t have any actionable insight. To look what’s behind whether or not someone will recommend you, you have to look at individual brand attributes. Every brand is different, and you can go as deep or wide as possible, but for many B-2-B products it comes down to the following higher level categories: Price, Product quality, Quality of service and support / technical support, Knowledge of the sales organization / representative and product fit to the customer need. Each of these can be individually measured to further understand for what attribute a company is under-performing or performing well. But, that is not enough, because all customers are not equal and every attribute must be further segmented by various types customer. At a minimum these are customers, non-customers and competitors customers. Depending on the company strategy existing customers might also have to be segmented into key accounts and others. In addition attributes needs to be segmented by product category. All this creates a challenge for marketers in regards to the qualified sample size, but since brand perceptions change slowly for many b-2-b products, it’s better to measure extensively less frequently, rather than do quick on the surface assessment that only provides artificial non-actionable benchmarks.
