B2B brand study
B2B Brand Equity
We measure and assess the power of your B2B brand relative to your competition, so the next marketing dollar goes where buyers already feel a gap.
Chapter 01
Brand strength is usually assumed, not measured
Most B2B leadership teams carry a confident picture of how the market sees them. The sales team hears a few compliments, a long-standing account renews, and the picture hardens into fact. What rarely exists is a side-by-side reading of how buyers rate your company against the two or three names they actually weigh you with, and that is the number brand equity comes down to. Power is relative. A brand that looks strong in your own conference room can sit third in the mind of the buyer who signs the purchase order.
A brand equity engagement at Power Decisions starts by asking what decision is on the table. A company about to raise prices needs to know whether the name carries a premium. A company about to enter a new category needs to know whether the name travels. A company preparing for an acquisition needs to know how it will be seen by an audience that has never heard of it. The question you are trying to settle sets the design, so we agree on it with you before any fieldwork begins.
The engagement plan is tailored and approved by you before work starts. Your judgement counts here, because you know which competitors keep turning up in bake-offs and which customers you are most afraid to lose. We start by listening to that, and the study is built around it.
A brass wax-seal stamp beside a plum wax seal on heavy cream paper
Measuring brand power against the competitors buyers actually compare you with
Brand image is measured in the words of the people who buy. For Teletrac, the commercial vehicle GPS systems provider, Power Decisions conducted three B2B studies. Two of them gathered brand image, price sensitivity and repeat purchase preference from Teletrac customers through one-to-one phone interviews. A follow-up study used a B2B online forum to gather qualitative views, satisfaction and brand image data about one target competitor. Customers were heard one to one, and views on a competitor were gathered in the format that suited that question.
That pairing is the pattern we bring to brand work. Kinetic Depth Interviews, our peer-level one-to-one conversations run from an interview plan rather than a questionnaire, surface the associations buyers attach to a name: what they trust it for, what they would not trust it with, and the word they use when they describe it to a colleague. Online forums, actively moderated over several days, reach the executives, managers and other hard-to-reach buyers who rarely answer a survey. Where a larger and more varied audience matters, a quantitative component puts numbers behind what the conversations suggested.
Awareness and image can also be measured before a company becomes visible in a new market. A European petroleum company wanted to build its corporate image in the United States ahead of its acquisition of an American company. Power Decisions delivered a targeted national image assessment that included an advertising awareness survey and an analysis of audience demographics. The principle is the same whether the brand is a GPS platform or a refiner: find out what the audience already believes before you decide what to say to it.
Chapter 03
Turning the gaps into brand decisions you can act on
The deliverable is an executive brief, not a data dump. Themes, verbatim buyer quotes and the competitive picture are translated into plain recommendations: where your brand leads, where it trails, and which gaps are worth closing. A gap between how you see yourself and how buyers see you is only useful if it points to an action, whether that is a change to your messaging, a different story for the sales team, a repositioning, or a decision to leave a weak spot alone because no buyer cares about it.
We lay out brand options as a short list of real choices, in line with how Power Decisions treats every strategic decision: a robust decision has two or more real options on the table, not a single idea to approve or reject. Brand equity findings often feed directly into B2B positioning and B2B messaging work, and the same interviews can be reused to test new wording with the people who will hear it.
If you want a first read on whether a brand study fits what you are facing, call Thomas Brown, Senior Consultant, at 415-328-7927 or write to Tom@powerdecisions.com. A short conversation about the decision in front of you usually shows quickly which parts of the picture are worth measuring.
Power Decisions, Forest Knolls, California. Call 415-328-7927.