In industrial marketing, emphasis is on showing features and benefits of the product or service one is selling. There are no impulse purchases, buying is done through a process: identification of need, development of specs, vendor list, RFP and negotiations. Lowest total cost is more important than lowest price.
Brands are used to facilitate the buying process, for example by projecting stability and expertise (ITT, GE or IBM) or innovation (Godwin Pumps, Intel). Brands take some anxiety out of the buying process, and give the buying agent something familiar to hold on to when looking for solutions needed.
Now, with a lot of uncertainty and lack of visibility in the economy, brands are taking on additional importance. In a recent article in Kellogg World (http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/kwo/spr11/features/carpenter.htm), Professor Gregory Carpenter holds that brands can help slow down competition by carrying over a company’s good reputation across ever shorter technology cycles.
He also points out that we no longer fully understand how buyers learn, and where they get their information in a hyper- competitive slow growth environment. Hence, brands are becoming more important as differentiators, since a strong brand is more difficult to build or copy than a product or service offering.
The great challenge for organizations now is to be nimble, to have a clear strategic direction and the organization structure to be able to quickly make and implement important decisions.
What used to take months now has to be done in weeks and days… This entrepreneurial mindset is difficult to marry with large organizations, but with proper decentralization and delegation it can be done. Perhaps a closer study of how Venture Capital companies manage their portfolio businesses could shed some light into speedy decision- making and implementation?
Interesting fundamental difference between B2B and B2C customers; No impulse purchases as seen in B2C, rather buying is done through a set process.