Nubs mba group management project team

Inskip, Irene’s (2004) work proves through interviews with various industry personnel that Branding programmes cost money, but successful SMEs are willing to pay this if the service is appropriate. Her work also concedes to the fact that B2B is not just about differentiating via service superiority. It’s also about branding, where the brand acts as a promise of providing the benefit that the customer expects from it.

Morrison (2001) provides some interesting pitfalls of B2B branding. He talks of the myth that only products are branded and remarks that “brands cannot take care of themselves”.

An SME like Realeyes has to understand the holding points of its brand support and learn to manage the brand, internationally since it is an asset that follows the company everywhere it launches.

But overall, Ballantyne and Aitken (2007) state some very vital findings about service-dominant logic of branding that a brand-mark is a relational asset whose value to the firm is contingent on past, present and future interactions with various firm stakeholders. Realeyes may be a fresh SME, but it is equally important to keep a trace of its recent past, and maintain a consistent track record for the brand to develop over time over the minds of businesses, even as it launches in foreign markets like Australia, since brand strategies can affect the strategic positioning of firms within partnerships made.

Davis et al (2008) present an information-rich branding insight while examining the relations between Brand equity, Brand Image and Brand Awareness of service provision companies. They hypothesize that brand awareness and brand image positively correlated to brand equity, and reason them out with evidences. One of their conclusions was that the brand awareness was a significant driver of brand equity for service providers. This piece of research would be useful while developing Realeyes’ marketing plan.

There are many academic papers and publishes proposing different branding models, however, generally they have some points in common as follows:

1. 
   Brand equity is perceived by customer
   
2. 
   Brand equity only exists when customer perceives it
   
3. 
   Brand should be continuously managed in a consistent, clear communication with customers; rather than a unilateral push-marketing
   
4. 
   A successful brand needs customer’s involvement
   

Branding strategy will be mainly based on the framework of CBBE model (Keller, 2001). Young and Rubicam’s asset evaluator model and Millward Brown’s Brand dynamics models also have concepts similar to the CBBE model.

4. Stages of research: the other perspective

1. 
   Local Segmentation
   
2. 
   Targeting
   
3. 
   Positioning
   
4. 
   International Marketing tactics
   

Their work identifies four main barriers to implementation: the context dependent nature of segmentation, the dynamic interaction between products, customers, and the marketplace, the difficult and demanding nature of the process, and the importance of implementation. Figure 4 shows the segmentation derivation process.

Figure 4 - Segmentation derivation and implementation; Palmer & Millier (2003)