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Harvard's John Quelch offers a summary of his study regarding B2B brands, on his Harvard Business Online blog post here. His post, titled "How to Build a B2B Brand," cites five characteristics of leading global B2B brands. They are...
- The CEO is a willing brand cheerleader, loves the brand heritage and is a great storyteller. The CMO sees his or her purpose as helping the CEO achieve this role.
- The CEO understands that building brand reputation reduces commercial risk, insulates the company in a crisis and provides the common purpose that can bond all the company’s stakeholders.
- Efforts are focused on a single, global corporate brand rather than individual product brands.
- The payback on marketing expenditures is measured rigorously to the satisfaction of the hard-nosed engineers and finance staff who run the typical B2B enterprise.
- Coordination of company websites worldwide to present a consistent face to stakeholders is the best way to get control of marketing communications that may have become too decentralized.
I'm thrilled to see this conversation, and I added to the discussion in my own comment. In essence, I said:
- The earlier adopters of global brand strategies, like Accenture, will enjoy the "ownership" of brand promises, making it harder for other global B2B brands, especially in the same or tangential sectors, to own brand promises that are even slightly similar. As B2B and professional service firms increasingly jump on the Brandwagon, developing a valuable differentiation strategy will become critical.
- Accenture is nearly singular in its devotion of a significant level of resources (time, money, longevity of effort, etc.) to promulgate its brand message. I haven't seen many firms devote quite as much focus to brand building as has Accenture. Not that other firms aren't trying. I recently described in my monthly newsletter, The Marketplace Master, how leading accounting firm Grant Thornton has grown awareness of its own brand promise through a steadily increasing advertising budget; an initiative that has resulted in a corresponding increase in revenues.
What other B2B or professional service firms do you think are branding leaders? How unique is their brand promise, especially from the brand promise of their competitors? Who's putting a lot of effort into global branding?
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Comments
Good post, Suzanne. I can't offer any examples right now, but wanted to add that this approach is important - not just to large companies - but to small and mid-sized ones, too. The smaller companies often don't consider their "big-picture" brand, perhaps thinking they're too small for it. In my opinion, small business branding is even more important to help them stand out from the crowd.
Posted by: Elaine Fogel | 12.04.07
While also a little bit B2C with some acquisitions, Cisco is another solid B2B example. There are few better storytellers than John Chambers.
Posted by: Paul Barsch | 12.04.07
Suzanne, I have a post on the same study "B2B Branding, How Important Is It?" on why brand-building should matter to B2B CEOs.
However, to answer your specific question about who’s putting a lot of effort into global branding, I agree with Paul Barsch that Cisco is a candidate.
It turns out that Quelch talks about branding in another post on Ingredient Branding, and my comments on that post address the example of Cisco:
“I agree with Dr. Quelch that ingredient branding is important and is becoming more common.
It even happens with mega-brands becoming ingredients within other brands. His example of Nippon Airways and the Dreamliner is a good one. Another example is AT&T and Cisco. (Full disclosure: Cisco is a Crimson client). I’d argue Cisco is a bigger business brand than AT&T and yet, Cisco offers a “Cisco Powered” Quality of Service certification for qualified service providers. This is a “win” for both parties:
• AT&T has qualified for this ingredient branding which enables AT&T to brag about the quality of its managed service offered to businesses.
• This is a win for AT&T because the Cisco brand carries such significant weight with business (and technical) decision-makers. AT&T can more effectively gain mindshare via a quality certification, and differentiate their offering from other service providers.
• This is also a win for Cisco because it creates a closer partnership between the two companies, and it extends Cisco’s brand to the business buyer. This brand extension helps Cisco position products more effectively to (non service provider) businesses as well.
I also argue that Cisco is much better at marketing to businesses than AT&T. Not only do they have a stronger brand, but they know how to leverage that brand. The key to ingredient branding is that both parties win, and Cisco has created a mechanism to enable a win-win with AT&T, and a variety of service providers. The smarter company drives the branding, whether it’s as an ingredient or not.”
Posted by: Glenn Gow | 12.05.07
Elaine, Glenn, and Paul: you've correctly pointed out the relationship between "effort" and "results" in the B2B branding game -- and correctly implied that the two aren't always synonymous. Now I have a question: what happens when the CEO is NOT a good storyteller?
Posted by: Suzanne Lowe | 12.05.07