دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی عینیت برند صنعتی بر روی مزیت منابع - الزویر 2018

ABSTRACT

Based on resource advantage theory of competition, we attempt to identify industrial brand equity dimensions in today's competitive, high-technology, and global business-to-business environment. Through a quantitative study with 443 buying center members who are purchase decision makers, we find that industrial brand equity can be established in a number of dimensions: (1) functional advantage in products, (2) solution advantage in services, (3) analytical advantage in CRM, (4) omni-channel advantage in communication, (5) symbolic advantage in publicity, and (6) network advantage in resource sharing. The six dimensions have significant impacts on customer perceived value and brand loyalty. Furthermore, purchasers, managers, and users, who undertake major decision making roles in the buying center, weigh these dimensions differently during brand evaluations. The findings suggest that industrial brand managers focus on building brand equity through establishing key resource advantages in the different brand usage situations encountered by buying center members.

5. Discussion

Brand equity not only brings together a set of brand associations to customers in marketing communications, but also provides simplified reasons to buy (Aaker, 1996). In the business-to-business market, industrial brand equity has been considered a priceless asset for suppliers because value attributes such as quality and reliability can be tied to a brand name (Bendixen et al., 2004; Mudambi, 2002). Compared to previous branding frameworks focused on a narrower industrial reproduction process, this study extends the scope of brand equity by identifying a wide-ranging set of customer value elements for industrial customer firms. Our framework includes six key industrial brand equity dimensions: (1) functional advantage in products, (2) solution advantage in services, (3) analytical advantage in CRM, (4) omni-channel advantage in communication, (5) symbolic advantage in publicity, and (6) network advantage in resource sharing. Only the first dimension has been discussed in the previous industrial branding literature. Taken together, various functional attributes such as speed, durability, reliability, or toughness found in industrial products are an important aspect for industrial branding, but functional advantage in products only accounts for 7% of the variance in industrial brand equity in the exploratory factor analysis. We have further identified another five dimensions that jointly account for 74% of the variance in industrial brand equity. The results highlight some of the brand associations perceived by customers doing business in today's technology-based business-to-business platforms. For example, analytical advantage in CRM accounts for 23% of the total variance, and omni-channel advantage in communication accounts for 11%.