Creating an effective B2B brand strategy with market research

Key takeaways: AI overviews at the top of Google results pages are significantly impacting PPC performance and SEO visibility. Therefore high engagement, recall, and brand strength are crucial to stay top-of-mind and keep customers coming back to your brand. You can inform your B2B brand strategy and then track its success with targeted market research that includes your customers and prospects.

Introduction

Many marketers prioritize short-term goals over long-term ones in B2B, with their resources allocated accordingly.

According to Marketing Week’s State of B2B Marketing, 52% of B2B marketers’ main budget is for short-term tactics. Less than a third, 30%, use both long and short-term marketing tactics while only 16% prefer to focus on a long-term strategy.

And nearly two-thirds – 62% – of B2B marketing campaigns focus on promoting products but only 37% on brand building, according to a B2B Marketing Benchmark report by LinkedIn. A long-term brand strategy has never been more important, however.

AI overviews at the top of Google results pages are significantly impacting both PPC performance and SEO visibility. But searches for specific brands are largely unaffected, according to Search Engine Land and Search Engine Journal.

Implications for B2B marketers

It means that these days, you can’t just measure marketing success by metrics such as click-through rate and traffic.

Engagement, recall, and brand strength are crucial for staying top-of-mind and keeping customers coming back to your brand even when AI overviews try to give them shortcuts.

There are many benefits to having a strong brand strategy, even if some are not easy to quantify or measure directly. A strong brand:

• It makes you a must-have on shortlists
• It simplifies the decision for buyers, who prefer the easy choice i.e. the top-of-mind brand
• When the cost of making the wrong choice is high for customers, a strong brand makes you the safe choice – ie. ‘nobody gets fired for buying IBM’
• A strong brand is crucial when it is difficult to compare products and services i.e. the buyer has limited knowledge, or the product is complex
• It allows you to charge extra, because higher brand recognition and prices imply your offering is better
• It builds preference and loyalty i.e. buyers want to be associated with your brand, switching feels like a risk

In this guide, we cover how to create an effective B2B brand strategy with market research.

Brand architecture: How to scale without losing identity

B2B market research can help companies understand current customer perceptions of their brand in many ways. Starting from scratch, it can identify how they understand its overall organization and presentation – in terms of portfolio, names, logos, and so on.

#1 Main brand architecture decisions

Most organizations manage multiple brands. Large organizations have a portfolio of brands, including:

• A corporate-level brand e.g. Alphabet
• Business unit or subsidiary brands e.g. Google
• Product line brands e.g. Google Pixel smartphones
• Individual product brands e.g. the Google Pixel 9

This brand architecture is how this portfolio is organized – how the brands relate to and differentiate from each other. Many companies have a strategy here, but are inconsistent with it, often confusing their customers or prospects.

There are many benefits to having a well-structured brand architecture, including:

• Simplifying marketing efforts and reducing costs
• Making it easier to raise awareness of other brands in the portfolio
• Making it easier to cross-sell
• Targeting your market segmentation more accurately
• Increasing overall brand equity or value

B2B brand architecture research explores perceptions of the existing brand architecture:

• Awareness of all your company’s existing brands and capabilities
• Perceptions of each brand
• Affinity towards existing brands
• Whether sub-brands are overlapping or differentiated
• Strengths and weaknesses vs competitors

And if you want to make changes to the brand architecture, research can reveal:

• How to better leverage existing perceptions and brand equity
• The role of your brand in purchasing decisions
• The benefits and drawbacks of changes

Brand and product names should also factor in desired characteristics that your customers can buy into:

#2 Brand and product naming

When the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) evaluates copyright applications, it uses a sliding scale to validate whether you can register and protect a name.

It’s a useful way of thinking about different approaches to brand or product naming. In their words, unacceptable trademarks include names that are:

• Generic: The common name for your goods – for example, a SaaS company cannot register its name as “SaaS”
• Descriptive: Only very distinctive descriptive names can be trademarked in some circumstances, otherwise they are too weak – i.e. Booking.com exists, but you’re unlikely to find a company called “Reserve-a-Room”

In contrast, acceptable and unique trademarks are:

• Suggestive: These names allude to brand or product qualities, without stating them outright – for example, DoorDash
• Arbitrary: They work well in an unusual context – Apple would not be a memorable name for an orchard, but it’s very distinctive for technology 
• Fanciful: Invented words – for example, Google

The jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) framework can help you to find a strong, suggestive name that reflects your ideal brand or product positioning and isn’t too generic or descriptive.

To use the JTBD framework:

• #1 Define your target audience: This could be the core user, the support team, the buyer, or all three in B2B
• #2 Map out the ‘jobs’ customers need to be done: These are outcomes, not features – they can be functional, emotional, or related jobs
• #3 Identify the opportunity: Prioritize the most important, frequent, and unique jobs – based on your target audience’s needs but also the competitive landscape

Qualitative research can help with the first two steps – for example, a segmentation or persona research study for step #1; ethnographies, in-depth interviews, or ideation workshops for step #2. 

If there are lots of jobs to prioritize at step #3, you can use quantitative research, as well as secondary research to review competitor names and offerings.

#3 Visual identity and logos

Names are one thing, but what about the accompanying visual identity systems, imagery or logos? The best visual identity and logos also need careful development to make sure they are:

• Distinct – the more they stand out from the crowd, the easier they are to ‘own’ and you can signal that “we’re different,” cutting through the noise
• Appropriate for your sector and target audience, so your brand identity seems differentiated but still relevant and credible
• Aligned with your positioning and support the rest of your brand-building activity
• Triggering positive feelings and sentiment towards your brand
• Durable and will stand the test of time, so you can grow and evolve without needing to change your logo every few years

B2B market research can support the development of a new brand visual identity system, including logos, by identifying:

• How the target market reacts to different logo, strapline, or identity options
• The messages conveyed by each of the options
• Potential revisions to optimize their impact

Research can also track current brand performance marketing, whether you’re optimizing its overall architecture or not:

How to do brand tracking in B2B market research

Brand tracking studies help marketers to check that they are allocating resources to short-term tactics or long-term strategic goals effectively by:

• Measuring overall brand health, monitoring how it is changing over time
• Comparing their company brand health against competitors
• Demonstrating the ROI of marketing initiatives
• Diagnosing and correcting brand health issues

In more detail, B2B brand tracking research lets marketers measure many brand health metrics.

#1 Brand prominence metrics

• Top-of-mind awareness of the brand
• Spontaneous awareness
• Prompted awareness
• Understanding of what the company offers
• Credibility in desired service areas

#2 Brand stances

• Spontaneous associations with the brand
• Extent the brand is perceived to be unique
• How the brand marketing is differentiated
• Whether the brand owns its desired brand attributes
• Whether the brand’s services are relevant to clients

#3 Brand performance

• What is your reputation among the target audience
• To what extent do you deliver on your promise
• What drives supplier choice, and how do you perform against those measures
• How the brand performs versus competitive intelligence
• Level of satisfaction among existing customers

#4 Brand authority

• The extent to which the brand is seen as authentic
• Level of affinity for the brand
• Level of pride in association
• The extent of market leadership

#5 Brand health

• How many businesses currently use you
• The extent to which prospects would consider working with you in future
• The extent to which customers would consider continuing to work with you
• Whether businesses would prefer you to competitors
• Whether clients have referred you to colleagues and peers
• The extent to which you can justify a premium price

There’s also long-standing evidence that emotions influence buyers’ decision-making more in B2B markets than in B2C. As a result, it’s worth factoring customers’ emotions into decisions involving your brand strategy:

Measuring customers’ brand emotions in B2B

B2B purchasers are nearly 50% more likely to buy when seeing some personal gain or value in their choice, research from Google found. Also, when they see personal value in a product or service, they’re eight times more likely to pay more.

Again, when strong brands that are evenly matched to competitors but have a greater emotional connection to their audience, customers are more likely to choose them. They may pay more too.

Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman claimed that 95% of purchase decision-making takes place subconsciously, in How Customers Think. In B2B, the subconscious impact is arguably greater than in B2C where usually, only one consumer makes the decision. 

And in B2B, there tend to be larger decision-making units. Each person in that unit brings their subconscious decision-making process and emotions to the table.

There are hidden, or unspoken, dynamics that they are unaware of. They’re unlikely to articulate the impact of their emotions correctly, because they don’t know how their subconscious decision-making works.

That’s why it’s crucial to understand the different emotions affecting B2B buying behavior. 

Common cognitive biases include:

• Cognitive framing
• Recency bias
• Anchoring bias
• In-group bias
• Distinctive encoding
• Endowment effect and loss aversion
• Inertia
• Exposure effect
• Hyperbolic discounting
• Sunk-cost effect

Benefits of successfully researching how emotions affect buying behavior in B2B include:

• Understanding underlying drivers of purchase decision-making
• Validating which ones have the greatest impact on product or service uptake
• Identifying how to target these drivers in sales and powerful marketing strategies

How B2B market research helps shape your brand strategy

You can use the insights and recommendations from brand research for the following goals and objectives:

• Driving organic growth
• Informing M&A activities
• Identifying new market opportunities
• Evaluating customer behavior and preferences
• Informing product and service development

#1 Driving organic growth

There are lots of different ways that brand research can tell you how to get new customers – and sell more to existing ones.

• Finding the ideal positioning: Use the insights to move your brand towards desired, differentiated, and credible positioning… Then longer-term, build on your credibility, aiming for more aspirational positioning to become the ideal brand
• Improving brand value: Identify specific areas of poor brand health and address them – e.g. to increase awareness, consideration, and purchase intent

In these ways, brand research can contribute to an organic growth model, one not reliant on developing new products or entering new markets.

#2 Informing M&A activities

When it comes to M&A activity, if you can prove you’re acquiring a well-performing brand, the due diligence report should look good.

If the brand is strong, it will be many customers’ go-to choice. They’ll understand the benefits of buying and may be willing to pay a premium for it too.

However, it’s important to understand why the brand is strong, so you know how to maintain and grow this reputation after the acquisition.

#3 Identifying new market opportunities

Beyond the untapped potential of improved products and services, feedback during brand research could indicate an opportunity to expand into new markets.

That’s particularly the case if competitive intelligence suggests there is some white space for you to play in.

Further market assessment research can inform your go/no-go decision, evaluate the competition, and forecast the market size.

After that, you can also use research to inform your go-to-market strategy. These studies can test your roadmap, timing, pricing, and sales approach.

#4 Evaluating customer behavior and preferences

Brand research reveals a lot about your customers. Crucially, it indicates what they want and how they react as a result.

For example, below-par brand recall or awareness scores on a tracker could indicate that there are significant barriers in the customer journey.

Further research can analyze how your brand performs at each touchpoint – perception tracking can help here.

Similarly, low consideration or purchase intent scores may indicate friction in the buying process. Buying process research explores how it works and how you can influence it.

#5 Informing product and service development

Improving your brand positioning and monitoring its health could reveal gaps in your product portfolio.

Alternatively, it may reveal unmet needs that neither you nor your competitors are currently targeting.

The insights should lead to a market opportunity analysis and if that’s successful, they can also inform better products or services. 

Additionally, new product development research can help you:

• Get closer to what customers and prospects want
• Optimize concepts
• Identify the best pricing strategy
• Forecast demand for the product
• Develop the right promotional brand strategy

Best practices for brand strategy research in B2B

#1 Use segmentations to check your brand positioning

Different groups in your customer base will have varying perceptions of your brand building and positioning. Brand equity research at only the overall level risks overlooking the views of some important segments.

Therefore, for the most accurate results, brand research should include all your key buyer types. You can support a wide range of sales and marketing activities with a B2B market segmentation.

When you have limited time or resources, you could prioritize customers that appear to represent the best opportunity. Look for a high or strong expected customer lifetime value, profitability, and likelihood to purchase.

#2 Include international markets to explore cultural factors

International brand strategies require careful market-specific adaptation, as customer needs and preferences can differ dramatically across regions. A standardized approach can fail across multiple countries.

There are many cultural differences between and even within countries – if you ignore too many of these differences, it could significantly impact your success.

Factors to consider in international B2B market research include:

• Picking appropriate fieldwork dates and times
• Localizing the research materials
• Using native moderators for interviews

Budget permitting, try to include all your key markets.

#3 Sense check changes to brand positioning with key stakeholders

Any changes to brand positioning need to resonate with your colleagues. They need to set the tone for the brand at touchpoints with customers.

Brand research conducted in a silo risks alienating stakeholders. If its insights and recommendations don’t build on existing internal perceptions, they’ll be less likely to accept the results.

And if a brand’s marketing team changes its approach to embrace a new identity, but customers see something different when interacting with its representatives, there’ll be a disconnect. This disconnect and lack of brand consistency will undermine the new positioning.

Therefore any brand development project should also include input from key internal stakeholders to capture their perceptions of what the brand should stand for.