The best brands consistently win two crucial moments of truth .

The first moment occurs when customers choose, select or sign thecontract to buy after having evaluated all other offerings of thecompetition. The second moment occurs at the customers homes,offices or production sites when they use the brand, when they ex-perience it and are satisfied or not satisfied. Brands that consistentlywin these moments of truth earn a special place in the customersminds and hearts. These brands are remembered and the re-buy oc-curs more readily and more profitably. The value of trust earnedbetween the brand promise and the brand experience realized hasalways been the simple foundation in any sustainable commercialendeavor.Some industrial brands focus intensely on winning these momentsof truth. They do this by being in touch with their clients and cus-tomers, and by understanding not only their engineering and appli-cation requirements but also their brand expectations. We have learned that brands like IBM dont stand only for mainframe computer servers or IT software, but for operating a bank or airline 24hours and 365 days. Apple is more than its technology; it is a brandthat continuously thinks differently. Brand building goes far beyond creating awareness of your nameand your customers promise. It is a voyage of building a corporatesoul and infectiously communicating it inside and outside the com-pany to all your partners, so that your customers truly get whatyour brand promises.Although one of the authors wrote this statement many years ago,we are all still committed to it. The world around us has changedand is constantly changing every year, every month, and everyday. Technologies/products and services/marketplaces emerge,evolve, and disappear. Along with globalization and hyper compe-tition has come the explosion of choices in almost every area. Busi-ness-to-Consumer (B2C) companies have identified and appliedbranding and brand management decades ago to adapt to thesechanges. Many Business-to-Business (B2B) companies still regardsuch effort as irrelevant for them. Recently though, B2B brand man-agement has been given more and more attention by researchers aswell as practitioners all over the world. Following up on this recentdevelopment, we offer the following central tenet: Brand management for industrial goods and services represents a unique and effective opportunity for estab-lishing enduring, competitive advantages. Whether you are selling products or services, a strong brand is themost important and sustainable asset your company can have. Yourbrand strategy should always be the guiding principle behind everydecision and every action. Branding is not only about creating fancy names and logos. Toequate branding with such superficial cosmetic effort is like judginga book merely by its colorful cover. It is absolutely crucial to under-stand that there is more to brands than meet the eye. Just take onemoment and try to imagine a world without brands. There wouldbe no Porsche,Mercedes-Benz, BMW , Volvo , Chrysler , and no Ford, justa variety of automobiles that are more or less alike. Such a world wouldlack much more than just fancy brand names and logos it wouldlack one of the most important factors that simplify our life in anincreasingly complex environment: Orientation . Brands differenti-ate, reduce risk and complexity, and communicate the benefits andvalue a product or service can provide. This is just as true in B2B asit is in B2C!

There is anold saying among marketers: Nothing kills a bad product fasterthan good advertising. 6 Without great products or services and anorganization that can sustain them, there can be no successfulbrand.Now you may wonder what branding really is all about. Scott Bed-bury, author of the book A New Brand World puts it as follows: 7 Branding is about taking something common andimproving upon it in ways that make it more valuableand meaningful. Brands serve exactly the same general purpose in B2B markets asthey do in consumer markets:They facilitate the identification of products, services and businesses as well as differentiate them from thecompetition. 8 They are an effective and compellingmeans to communicate the benefits and value a productor service can provide. 9 They are a guarantee of quality,origin, and performance, thereby increasing the per-ceived value to the customer and reducing the risk andcomplexity involved in the buying decision. 10 Brands and brand management have spread far beyond the tradi-tional view of consumergoods marketers. Brands are increasinglyimportant for companies in almost every industry. Why? For onething, the explosion of choices in almost every area. Customers foreverything from specialty steel to software now face an overwhelm-ing number of potential suppliers. Too many to know them all, letalone to check them out thoroughly. A brand is emotional, has apersonality, and captures the hearts and minds of its customers. Great brands survive attacks from competitors and market trendsbecause of the strong connections they forge with customers. Andthat is what Pitney Bowes wants to achieve with its B2B customers.The Internet furthermore brings the full array of choices to everypurchaser or decision maker anywhere with just one mouse click.Without trusted brands as touchstones, buyers would be over-whelmed by an overload of information no matter what they arelooking for. But brands do not only offer orientation, they havevarious benefits and advantages for customers as well as the brandparents, the originating company. They facilitate the access to newmarkets by acting as ambassadors in a global economy A brand is an intangible con-cept. To simplify it and make it easier to grasp is quite oftenequated with the more tangible marketing communications ele-ments that are used to support it advertising, logos, taglines, jin-gles, etc but a brand is so much more than that: 14

A brand is a promise. A brand is the totality of perceptions everything you see,hear, read, know, feel, think, etc. about a product, service, orbusiness. A brand holds a distinctive position in customers minds basedon past experiences, associations and future expectations. A brand is a short-cut of attributes, benefits, beliefs and valuesthat differentiate, reduce complexity, and simplify the deci-sion-making process. Businesses with a strongbrand positioning are benefiting from clarity of focus that providesthem with more effectiveness, efficiency and competitive advantageacross operations. 20 Brand comprises various aspects. A brand is a promise, thetotality of perceptions everything you see, hear, read, know,feel, think, etc. about a product, service, or business. It holdsa distinctive position in customers minds based on past ex-periences, associations and future expectations. It is a short-cutof attributes, benefits, beliefs and values that differentiate, re-duce complexity, and simplify the decision-making process. Brand influence buyers decision(graoh) Klueber Lubrication A strongly branded company in this special area is Klueber . It is oneof the worlds leading lubricant suppliers, backed by more thanseventy five years of research and development experience. Klueber offers a comprehensive range of specialty lubricants for all kinds ofmachines and components in various branches of industry. Therange of highly cost-effective lubricants includes such well-knownand universally trusted brands as Barrierta, Isoflex, Hotemp and Sta-burags . Today, Klueber Lubrication has become synonymous withcompetence and experience in all matters regarding lubrication andturbo-engineering. 31 Is it possible after all that the brand of the product may be some-thing beyond the hard facts? Could it have a much greater influencethan is initially acknowledged? The truth is that the brand encom-passes everything, conscious or unconscious. Fig.6 illustrates thatthe brand is present in every influential dimension affecting thebuying center.Soft facts like security, risk reduction and trust are the most suscep-tible to brand and brand message. Brands reduce risk; if a buyer

chooses a well-known brand he thinks he is on the safe side. Bestexample: Nobody ever got fired for buying an IBM . Brand influ-ence doesnt stop there, unconsciously, it can also heavily impactthe way a person perceives hard facts like price, quality or serviceas in the case of IBM IBM products are generally not cheap, never-theless, quite often; a higher price is regarded as acceptable becausepeople automatically associate high quality and service with it.What do you expect its an IBM ! Whether you define it in common terms or use a technical or evenmathematical approach in defining brand equity, they will both endup meaning the same. Drivers of brand equity can be summarizedas follows: Perceived quality Name awareness Brand associations Brand loyaltyOf course it is unquestioned that the perceived quality of a productis an essential value driver. Name awareness is quite important,too, but shouldnt be overestimated as we will show in chapter six. Brand associations are generally everything that connects the cus-tomer to the brand, including user imagery, product attributes, usesituations, brand personality, and symbols. The most importantdriver of brand equity though is brand loyalty.