Building Brands in Business-to-Business

The challenge of delivering a consistent, coherent brand message magnifies when companies expand globally, complete acquisitions, or launch new products and services. Without a proactive brand strategy these changes can result in a hodge-podge of brands that compete against each other, dilute brand equity, and undermine growth objectives. When addressing brand strategy you should ask the following questions:

• How can we build a brand strategy that allows us to be perceived as an important, powerful market leader? Brand strategy goes far beyond selecting a logo, choosing font colors, and drafting a tagline. Before addressing these creative contributions to your brand, it’s critical to evaluate how best to express your firm’s central brand essence. Start by asking questions like: why does your company exist? How is it different from similar companies? How does it want to be perceived in the future? Can our firm successfully deliver on potential brand promises? These topics are the building blocks to a strong brand position. From this foundation, best-in-class business-to-business firms endow their brands with attributes that reach beyond product-centric benefits and traditional brand vocabulary. These companies avoid describing their capabilities in terms like “manufacturers of highly-engineered products.” Instead, they elevate their brand offering through association with attributes like “inventive,” “collaborative” and “smart.”
• How can we create a uniform brand identity for our corporation without diminishing the brand equity accrued in our various key business brands? Clear, comprehensive brand architecture is always important and especially crucial as a firm grows, diversifies and serves multiple customers in various market segments. This structure addresses more than how businesses are organized. It informs your constituents—customers, investors, suppliers, channel partners, employees and others—about what your company has to offer and how to access those capabilities. Effective brand architecture alleviates confusion and provides order for understanding when, how and why certain brands are used. The architecture can preserve equity in one business brand (perhaps one that has been recently acquired) while positioning the brand in a hierarchy so that it reflects, reinforces and augments other related corporate brands.
• How can brand image be developed to account for the variation in business practices and performance in different global regions? Go global, but act local. This advice is imperative in building a successful and enduring brand strategy. As your firm grows, the challenge of accommodating the diverse variations it encounters presents a useful, though sometimes puzzling, global-local tension. To avoid implementation conundrums and ensure that this global-local mix remains a source of healthy creative tension, keep these two guidelines in mind. 1) Create a brand promise that is comprehensive (not too general), differentiated (not a me-too message), and long-lasting (avoid today’s business buzz words) so that the message can transfer into other regions and markets. 2) Construct a flexible framework for your brand architecture. Allow the structure to accommodate new businesses and acquisitions regardless of whether the brand is expressed in Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, or any other language associated with your growth markets and opportunities.