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Paper info: What Do We Know About B2B Branding in Marketing Research? - A Comprehensive Status Quo Analysis

Title


What Do We Know About B2B Branding in Marketing Research? - A Comprehensive Status Quo Analysis

Authors


Uta Herbst, Natalie Schmidt, Sabrina Ploder and Viola Austen

Place of Publication


The paper was published at the 28th IMP-conference in Rome, Italy in 2012.

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Abstract


While brand management has long been a central tenet of consumer marketing, its systematic use is less established in industrial markets (Leek & Christodoulides 2011: Kotler & Pfoertsch 2007). However, the increased competition in business markets – where service, reliability, and quality are now assumed minimum requirements rather than order-winning criteria – has recently led industrial firms to pay more attention to the branding concept (Humphreys & Williams 1996: Zablah, Brown & Donthu 2010). In a highly competitive business environment, business-to-business (B2B) marketers are forced to successfully differentiate themselves by systematically steering their brands (Bendixen, Bukasa & Abratt 2004). Consequently, the analysis and management of B2B brands is highly important for marketing research and marketing practice.Although there is currently a trend towards status quo analysis within marketing research (e.g., the status quo analysis of buyer-seller negotiations (Herbst, Voeth & Meister 2011), of relationship marketing (Palmatier et al. 2006), and of customer satisfaction (Szymanski & Henard 2001)) in order to reveal which topics in the corresponding research area require deeper investigation, there is no study that provides a comprehensive overview of marketing studies with regard to B2B branding. Even the recent literature review provided by Leek and Christodoulides (2011) only focuses on selected issues in the B2B branding context.Consequently, our study’s main purpose is to provide an overview of the current status quo of B2B branding in marketing based on a broad literature review. In this context, we first conducted a quantitative analysis of extant literature on B2B branding within marketing. Specifically, we undertook a screening of all the top marketing journals to identify B2B branding-related articles. In a next step, we subjected the identified articles to qualitative analyses. Furthermore, we conducted co-citation analyses to investigate whether the existing findings are built upon each other: that is, whether they refer to one another.Our quantitative analysis revealed that there are only 98 articles deal with branding in the B2B context, representing only about 1% of all articles (around 9 825 articles) published in the most relevant (top) journals over the last 25 years. This number definitely does not reflect the actual significance of B2B branding in practice. Moreover, our qualitative analysis showed that some areas of B2B branding, such as building long-term buyer-seller relations by means of strong brands (e.g., Merz, Yi & Vargo 2009: Dahlstrom & Dato-on 2004), have been investigated much more thoroughly than other areas, such as brand emotions within buying centers (e.g., Lynch & de Chernatony 2004).Overall, it can be argued that further research is still required on B2B branding, as important areas of branding, e.g., the construct of brand personality or B2B brands in the international context, have not yet been investigated in the B2B context. This lack of research makes it difficult for B2B marketers to optimize their brand management.