There are often debates on the importance and role of brands in the B2B world.  Is brand perception driven totally by satisfaction with the customer experience?  Clearly more rational aspects such as product performance, experience and value are critical components, but in today’s procurement-led selection of suppliers and partners, is there a place for the softer, more emotional dimensions of a brand – and what implication does this have for the assessment of brand performance in the B2B arena?

At a strategic level, brands are brands, irrespective of the sector in which they operate, although with a seemingly more rational set of decision-making criteria, brands in the B2B world would appear to be built around rational benefits, value and service.  Interestingly though, one regularly-quoted brand saying from the 1970’s playing strongly in the emotional space is from the B2B arena:

‘No-one ever got fired for choosing IBM’

In an age when consumers research their purchases thoroughly online, talk to their friends for recommendations, and test out their potential purchases in store, exactly what role do store staff have to play beyond facilitating the experience? Recent research by GfK shows that the suitable mix of in-store recommendations and demonstrations, achieved by store staff training, can be highly effective at increasing sales.

A new GfK research programme has provided some unique insights into the ROI of store initiatives by combining mystery shopping results with individual store-level sales data. The programme reveals how the in-store experience translates into sales and shows the average uplift in sales resulting from different types of in-store activity. This is highly useful for brands that want to understand how to prioritise in-store marketing budgets, benchmark against competitors, negotiate better rates for display space, and calculate the ROI on in-store marketing spend.

So what are some of the key findings of this programme that are useful for marketers?

(You can read the full version of this article in the latest edition of GfK TechTalk here.)

As consumers, we’re handing over more and more data about ourselves in exchange for products and services we take for granted. It’s this individual-level data that’s likely to provide the next generation of recommendation models, and the user experiences they fortify.

Recently, for the first time in ages, a friend recommended an album to me and I went straight out and bought it. No listening to samples on iTunes, no streaming on Spotify, no whatever it was that we did before these formats existed – just me and my credit card. As it turned out, the album was disappointing. I don’t want to point fingers, and I’m not going to bore you with what it was, but it did spur me on to think about how the role of recommendation is being changed by technology.