Executive summary of Brand positioning strategies for industrial firms providing customer solutions

Citation

(2014), "Executive summary of Brand positioning strategies for industrial firms providing customer solutions", Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Vol. 29 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/JBIM-01-2014-0020

Brand positioning strategies for industrial firms providing customer solutions

Article Type: Executive summary and implications for managers and executives From: Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Volume 29, Issue 3

This summary has been provided to allow managers and executives a rapid appreciation of the content of the article. Those with a particular interest in the topic covered may then read the article in toto to take advantage of the more comprehensive description of the research undertaken and its results to get the full benefit of the material present.

Go back a few years and companies were offering "things" and "stuff" to customers – things you could immediately recognize as something you wanted or needed – and also offering assistance by undertaking tasks you could not or did not want to do yourself. These days it is different and organizations offer "solutions". For evidence, just take a quick browse of company names on the internet or glance at the signage and slogans on the vans and trucks you see on the roads. These days there appears to be a "solution" for everything – shelving solutions, software solutions, global solutions, environment solutions, and even dog-grooming solutions.

Some of the most valued business-to-business brands emphasize the types of goal that their solutions help to achieve, such as "building a smarter planet" (IBM), "use business insight more effectively" (SAP), "high performance, delivered" (Accenture). In fact, many of the world’s leading brands, including Apple, HP, Oracle, and Cisco Systems, have a strong focus on offering customer "solutions."

It has been the "buzz" word for a while but that is not to diminish its meaning, for these days firms in various sectors – notably information technology, telecommunications, and process technology – are integrating products and services into customer solutions. However, many firms struggle to brand and differentiate their solution offerings successfully, possibly because of the plethora of "solutions" with which consumers are bombarded. As integrated product and service offerings have become increasingly common, it is not enough for a firm to position itself as a "solution provider" or as a "total solutions provider". Instead, firms that wish to successfully integrate services with products need to design their brand positioning around their key capabilities and customers’ goals, and specify how they are helping their customers to achieve these goals.

Managers need to identify which capabilities have the most potential in delivering customer value, and match these with their customers’ goals. While competitor and customer analysis are an integral part of every brand positioning process they are not enough for solution brand positioning. Instead, solution providers need to engage in more in-depth analysis of their customers’ goals and develop a brand positioning strategy that highlights how the solution contributes to meeting these goals. By exploring the processes through which customers buy, use, and evaluate the offerings, solution providers can gain important insights on developing their brand positioning strategies.

In "Brand positioning strategies for industrial firms providing customer solutions" Anne Maarit Jalkala and Joona Keränen identify four possible brand position strategies for industrial firms providing customer solutions: customer value diagnostic, global solution integrator, high quality sub-systems provider, and long-term service partner. The strategies highlight the tendency of solution suppliers to position their brands around different capabilities that are needed at different phases of the solution delivery process.

The customer value diagnostic is focused on assessing a customer’s current performance, identifying opportunities to add value to the customer’s business, and estimating the potential monetary impact on the customer’s profitability. The dominance of this strategy supports the notion that customer value assessment and analysis is of increasing importance in industrial marketing. A global solution integrator uses its networks to design and integrate systems on a global scale that provide the greatest value to its customer, even if this means not using the supplier’s own products. This is consistent with the proposition that system suppliers can deliver value to their customers indirectly by providing access to actors with the relevant resources to enhance the customer’s business processes.

A quality sub-systems provider is focused on technological excellence with minimal service elements and delivering value through customized sub-systems that increase the performance of the primary solution. On the other hand, a long-term service partner uses a wide range of services to manage its customers’ long-term support, maintenance, and system optimization activities. This enables the customer to focus on core business processes, and delivers value through cost savings and/or increased process performance.

Besides competitor- and customer-specific factors that are central in brand positioning, firms that develop solution branding strategies need to take into account the distinctive characteristics of solution offerings. This study’s authors were rather surprised to find that the studied firms did not emphasize the complementarity of the service and product elements in their brand positioning strategies. From the customer’s perspective, the degree to which the perceived value increases when a product and service are used together is an important factor when considering whether to purchase an integrated solution or to source the product and service components from multiple suppliers. This means that firms that aim to build a strong solution brand need to point out the benefits that result from product and service integration.

Managers should carefully select customer cases that demonstrate the capabilities around which the selected brand positioning strategy is built, and communicate the selected cases both internally for creating a shared understanding of the new brand identity and externally to shape the stakeholders’ brand perceptions.

To read the full article type 10.1108/JBIM-10-2011-0138 into your search engine.

(A précis of the article "Brand positioning strategies for industrial firms providing customer solutions". Supplied by Marketing Consultants for Emerald.)