INDUSTRIAL BRANDING – DOES IT PAY OFF?

In a world characterized by the growth of global competition, a key question raised by business-to-business marketers is if brands in industrial markets really pay off, that is in which contexts and for what type of customers branding efforts are important and can bring competitive advantages for the companies owning those brands. The particularities and importance of branding in business has become a major field of scientific debate in the last years, but there are still questions unanswered and aspects unclear and under researched. Traditionally, B2B managers have been more skeptical about the benefits of branding, arguing that the organizational buying process is rational and focused on functional characteristics of the products and not based on the emotional values used in the B2C context. In this paper, we review the literature on brand equity in industrial markets and propose a synthetic conceptual model, with the purpose to shed more light on the issue of industrial branding