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This chapter describes the main issues in scientific literature related to industrial branding. First, we set the background focusing on industrial branding, followed by brand equity and measurement, and brand orientation in business markets. The second section relies on controversies and problems inherent in the gaps in theory and implementation of branding. The third section proposes several solutions and recommendations for academics and practitioners, followed by proposals for future research directions and conclusions. We also present a case study and several case questions arising.

Brand theory and practice have remained quite two-dimensional to this day and focus on logos, corporate design, website design, etc. As with atmospheres, it was the sales room where the brand idea was spatialised early on. This chapter discusses how to spatialise brand theory and to connect it with the place atmosphere model. Moreover, the chapter works out how the bridge between the strategy of an organisation (company, hotel, destination, etc.), its brand personality and the strategy of spatial design can be built. The brand personality shows itself in the long-term handling of the eight W questions of the brand space strategy (Who, Where, Wherein, What, Whom, Way to, What for and Why).

This chapter offers insights into one of the most influential aspects of external branding, namely, branding within business-to-business (B2B) sales. In particular, the authors of this chapter claim that B2B sales are indispensable for the growth and existence of a brand. The special attention of this chapter is focused on sales personnel, as representatives of firms and carriers of branding. In other words, the impact of sales personnel on branding in a B2B context is presented theoretically and examined empirically. The chapter thereafter offers an interesting case study of Logomo, a cultural venue in Finland, specializing in selling customized space to companies, as well as organizing different kinds of public events. Through a combination of theory and practice, the authors demonstrate the importance of branding within B2B sales and conclude by providing specific implications for practitioners.

The aim of this chapter is to shed light on a growing phenomenon in communication practice: employees speaking voluntarily for, about or on behalf of their organization, hereafter labelled as corporate ambassadors. The goal of this qualitative study is to analyze the role of corporate ambassadors within an organization and explore the perceived benefits and risks from three perspectives: the communication department, other departments such as marketing or human resources, and corporate ambassadors themselves. The research is based on an interdisciplinary literature review and 25 qualitative in-depth interviews with employees in one large, internationally operating German organization. By combining the theoretical and empirical insights, a conceptual framework that depicts the benefits (e.g., joy, increased trust, positive impact on reputation) and risks (e.g., work stress, lack of integration, loss of quality) of integrating corporate ambassadors into the overall communication of the organization was developed. In addition, this chapter suggests two typologies that help to distinguish between different roles of communication professionals and of corporate ambassadors. The contribution of this study is to lay a groundwork for further discussions about corporate ambassadors in the field of corporate communications. The chapter outlines directions for future research and implications for practice on how the framework can be applied in organizations.

In part because of the complexity and large risks involved, branding plays an important role in business-to-business (B2B) markets. Although marketers of B2B brands must do many of the things that marketers of any kind of product or service must do, six guidelines that are more unique to B2B settings can be defined.

First, the entire organization should understand and support branding and brand management. Employees at all levels and in all departments must have a complete, up-to-date understanding of the vision for the brand and their role. A brand mantra – a short three- to five-word summary of the essence of a brand – can help with this vertical and horizontal alignment.

Second, a corporate branding strategy should be adopted if possible with a well-defined brand hierarchy. Ideally, sub-brands would be created that combined a well-known and highly credible corporate brand name with descriptive product modifiers.

Third, to avoid falling into a commoditization trap, sufficient differentiation must be established to justify price premiums. To sustain that premium, it may be necessary to “frame” value perceptions to ensure that customers appreciate a brand's differences. Fourth, one often overlooked means of differentiation is to link brands to relevant non-product-related brand associations related to customer service, well-respected customers, or clients, etc.

Fifth, emotional associations related to a sense of security, social or peer approval, and self respect can also be linked to the brand and serve as sources of brand equity. Finally, customers must be carefully segmented both within and across companies and tailored marketing programs developed for these different segments.

Adopting these six guidelines will increase the likelihood of creating a strong B2B brand, reaping all the benefits that such an achievement entails.

This chapter elaborates on the usefulness of embracing complexity theory, modeling outcomes rather than directionality, and modeling complex rather than simple outcomes in strategic management. Complexity theory includes the tenet that most antecedent conditions are neither sufficient nor necessary for the occurrence of a specific outcome. Identifying a firm by individual antecedents (i.e., noninnovative vs. highly innovative, small vs. large size in sales or number of employees, or serving local vs. international markets) provides shallow information in modeling specific outcomes (e.g., high sales growth or high profitability) – even if directional analyses (e.g., regression analysis, including structural equation modeling) indicate that the independent (main) effects of the individual antecedents relate to outcomes directionally – because firm (case) anomalies almost always occur to main effects. Examples: a number of highly innovative firms have low sales while others have high sales and a number of noninnovative firms have low sales while others have high sales. Breaking-away from the current dominant logic of directionality testing – null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) – to embrace somewhat precise outcome testing (SPOT) is necessary for extracting highly useful information about the causes of anomalies – associations opposite to expected and “statistically significant” main effects. The study of anomalies extends to identifying the occurrences of four-corner strategy outcomes: firms doing well in favorable circumstances, firms doing badly in favorable circumstances, firms doing well in unfavorable circumstances, and firms doing badly in unfavorable circumstances. Models of four-corner strategy outcomes advance strategic management beyond the current dominant logic of directional modeling of single outcomes.

In the agri-food industries, particular importance is given to distribution. Indeed, maintaining good relationships with distributors is a necessity for industries seeking sound marketing performance. In this context, Moroccan agri-food companies recognize the importance of developing customer loyalty. They focus on maintaining good relationships based on trust with their distributors. Considerable research has investigated trust in business-to-business (B-to-B) relationships; however, research in the agri-food industry needs further investigation. Indeed, some past research studied the effect of benevolence on loyalty (Chen, 2008; Rampl, Eberhardt, Schütte & Kenning, 2012) but they ignored studying the effect on two types of loyalty – attitudinal and behavioral – in agri-food industries.

The paper here contributes to the literature in a number of meaningful ways. First, we explore loyalty strategies used by agri-food industries to maintain distributors. This enables us to better understand how trust can boost agri-food B-to-B relationships and distributor’s loyalty. We also investigate exactly the trust dimension (benevolence; credibility) that affects more loyalty in the agri-food industry. A better understanding of the trust dimension should provide practical guidelines as to how to facilitate loyalty in B-to-B relationships. In addition, we test the two dimensions of loyalty and the importance of the attitudinal one. Using structural equation modeling to analyze data, our findings confirm the importance of benevolence in relationships between Moroccan agri-food industries and their distributors. Indeed, the results explain that the development of customer loyalty is influenced by the development of benevolence in relationships with distributors, especially on attitudinal loyalty.

The purpose of this research is to review empirical research on customer involvement in innovation and identify future research directions that can better connect this research with marketing strategy literatures and offer opportunities for further theoretical development.

We conduct a review of empirical articles published in eight leading marketing and innovation journals between 2001 and 2017.

The review shows that the literature on customer involvement in innovation is highly diverse and fragmented, lacking a common understanding of what constitutes customer involvement in innovation and its theoretical underpinnings. There exists a multitude of conceptualizations of customer involvement in innovation, which limits effective accumulation of domain knowledge. A large number of studies have taken the customer’s perspective to examine their motivation to participate and ability to contribute, whereas less research has been done from the firm’s perspective to understand how firms may effectively manage the well-recognized challenges of customer involvement as well as the implications of customer involvement for long-term innovation strategy and overall performance. Based on the review, we offer recommendations for future research.

We identify important questions for future research that are highly relevant for the practice of customer involvement in innovation.

We provide a systematic review of the rapidly growing empirical research on customer involvement in innovation. We evaluate key points of differences in the literature and offer a synthesis that helps identify opportunities for future research.

This chapter identifies research advances in theory and analytics that contribute successfully to the primary need to be filled to achieve scientific legitimacy: configurations that include accurate explanation, description, and prediction – prediction here refers to predicting future outcomes and outcomes of cases in samples separate from the samples of cases used to construct models. The MAJOR PARADOX: can the researcher construct models that achieve accurate prediction of outcomes for individual cases that also are generalizable across all the cases in the sample? This chapter presents a way forward for solving the major paradox. The solution here includes philosophical, theoretical, and operational shifts away from variable-based modeling and null hypothesis statistical testing (NHST) to case-based modeling and somewhat precise outcome testing (SPOT). These shifts are now occurring in the scholarly business-to-business literature.